I will use my co-op experience to highlight the importance of this fact. I was tasked with taking down meeting minutes for a product that had already been in development long before I joined. I was told to mark down the most important points, especially those concerning potential revisions to the manufacturing or design of the prototype, whenever I conducted related projects. To my surprise, there were many concerns and a need for data from trials (that I had also contributed to), producing unsatisfactory results. 

For instance, a major part of our prototype’s manufacturing process involved using a molded mixture of plastic polymer and a filler material. The trials I participated in involved comparing the performance of compression molding against injection molding the same mixture to compare cycle times, material usage, costs, and overall feasibility with the design at the time. From these trials, we reported to our shareholders that compression molding was found to be more expensive in terms of time and material, as the viscosity of the mixture charge warranted a greater load to fill the core and cavity molds. Injection molding was the opposite in all metrics, demonstrating a much shorter cycle time and less required charge to come out with a complete part. 

During this particular meeting, the senior engineers had trouble answering questions relating to the specific level of each mixture and how the environments of both types of molders could warrant ingredient volume changes. Luckily, I had written down and created a spreadsheet organizing all of the recipes & parameters (RPs) we devised during another meeting for both circumstances, allowing us to give our shareholders exact values and price calculations. This gave the shareholders and engineers alike a clearer understanding of trends and performance of our RPs.

In my opinion, meeting minutes do matter as long as all topics and information was laid out on the table. Sometimes I find that when a meeting minutes time is established, people tend to worry on how long the they should be talking and sometimes topics get exacerbated. On the other hand, I definitely think there should not be a rush and good conversations should come about it. I would say a good 10 minutes per topic should be around how long good conversations should be had. 5 minutes would most definitely be too short and 45min - 1hr is where the topic can be too drawn out and lose interest of individuals. These can be extremely beneficial for big projects and help individuals get an idea on their roles and goals.

What meeting minutes are most useful for are for holding people accountable for anything else mentioned in meetings. Often times besides due tasks that might cover a larger scope, there are other smaller or unexpected tasks that need to be completed from a person on the team before being able to tackle the overall ask/task. Meeting minutes would document discussion on this and hold the person accountable. Something not commonly thought about...is also that these meeting minutes can be used to hold anyone accountable-possibly even management. Say you're in a project that's been delayed/impacted by a fixture not being ordered that management vetoed purchasing months ago-now you at least have a record of this happening so it doesn't fall on you.

Thus meeting minutes are helpful to those in a project as a refresh of small tasks needed, but also as good insurance/back up if things go awry.

While I understand where Dr. Simon and many of these posts are coming from, I would like to play devil's advocate and also recount a more negative aspect of meeting minutes. I have found in the past that taking and reviewing meeting minutes can also feel more tedious than beneficial. In many cases, especially when everyone is already in agreement, the minutes can be very repetitive of information we are already aware of. Additionally, with so many meetings, it can often feel overwhelming to keep up with the details of the minutes especially when they do not always add something new or constructive. I worked in a company where this was the case and even though minutes are helpful for those who need a refresher, sometimes it often feels like an additional item for your workload rather than simplification to it. The company I work for now has a streamlined process to focus on only key points or action items so that the minutes are more digestible. I highly recommend companies to adopt a similar approach as it was very useful!