The discipline of taking actions and notes is important in project management. However, in my opinion and recent experiences, the advent of agile methodologies and shorter timeframes for deliverables as seen the prevalence of taking actions and notes become less than it has been in the past. Once tracked effectively and managed in a way as to not diminish the wider management of the project than actions management can make sense.

As seen from a recent survey I carried out on LinkedIn, actions management and note taking still do have a place in modern day project management. The respondents to my survey overwhelmingly agreed that this is the case, however I must caveat the results by stating the survey pool was very small and the question posed was binary, either agree or disagree. But if the survey was scaled up and the results followed a similar oath then the survey would carry more weight. See results below.

Please see some important points below.

• Not every meeting necessitates the need for actions taking.

• Use your judgement and discretion to take actions when necessary.

• See table below for a sample actions log.

• Meetings like weekly status updates or/ and monthly steering committee meetings will most likely necessitate the need for actions taking.

• Once documented in a structured way actions should be sent to the attendees of the meeting and /or relevant stakeholders.

• As you see they should include task description / date opened / owner / business unit / due date / current status.

• Current status can be open / work in progress /closed.

• There is no exact science so it’s whatever works for you as a Project Manager but the actions log should be clear and concise with no ambiguity on what’s needs to be done & by whom.

• If needed set up short weekly calls to track the actions, anything in excess of weekly can be overkill and if bi weekly or monthly works then that’s fine too.

• However, do chase up individual actions with stakeholders to understand the status and to manage them appropriately.

• Do remember though that actions management is only a very small part of project management and do not let it detract or get in the way of managing the wider project deliverables.

• Actions management is a very small slice of the cake, 1 or 2% of all project tasks, whilst it can be forgotten, it cannot be over emphasized.

• As a Project Manager you can afford to get bogged down managing actions and then realise important deliverables / tasks have been mismanaged and missed.

• Keep closing off actions until all actions are completed but do realise that certain actions will take longer to close due to numerous variables such as stakeholder engagement / dependencies on other systems & projects / how technical an action is / resource availability and so on

• Remember it is not the Project Managers fault if an action takes long to close off as you are to track and manage not execute the action.