Midwest IT Survival

First, let me create a scene to frame my thoughts:

Write it down

You are finishing up a meeting with someone from marketing, someone from audit, someone from product and finally someone from operations.  Everyone was shaking their heads in agreement to all the tasks discussed for the last thirty minutes.  It seems redundant, but you close the meeting by re-summarizing the next steps:

“Sally, you are going to let the group know if operations doesn’t have the bandwidth to handing this special customer request plus let us know the name of your operations single point of contact for this

Judy, you are going to update the marketing knowledge base to indicate we now can offer this additional product feature.

Jim, you representing audit are fine with this approach but you will get back to the group if your peers feel uncomfortable.

Sam, product is going to create a small project request to kick off the effort to make the web site able to support this new feature plus you are going to let the group know if this is part of the monthly product usage fee or a new per item additional charge.

Ok, once we have all that, IT can get started enhancing the application.  See everyone in X days at the next touch point meeting”

With more heads nodding in agreement, you walk out of the meeting believing everyone knows what they have to do in the next few days to keep this moving.  You arrive X days later to discover the response to “did you complete your assignment?” is met with “Um, I didn’t think I needed to do anything?  I thought you were handling that?  What did I need to do again?”

It seems to me more and more, if key discussions aren’t written down with clear “Jim, you need to do X by Y” and distributed to all, people tend to not be thorough in their follow-thru.

Anyone else seeing this trend increasing/decreasing or am I just going crazy?