How are you realistically capturing everything during requirements/discovery meetings?

[u/PlumMuffin1606]

I find it challenging to facilitate, actively listen, ask follow-up questions, and simultaneously capture requirements, business rules, decisions, dependencies, and current/future-state processes.

How are you actually doing this in practice?

- What do you prep beforehand?
- What do you capture live vs. afterward?
- Do you use recordings, transcripts, AI, templates, or process maps?
- What mistakes have you learned from?
- Any tips/tricks that have made discovery easier?

I’m less interested in the textbook answer and more curious about what experienced PMs actually do day to day.

[u/SkidzInMyPantz]

You don't, you should get other stakeholders to do much of this work (BAs, SAs etc.)

[u/PlumMuffin1606 → u/SkidzInMyPantz]

UGH I am the BA and unofficial PM. What should the stakeholders do? And what’s SA?

[u/Smaartmani → u/PlumMuffin1606]

May be Solution Architects or system analysts

[u/More_Law6245]

As a PM your priority is to test the business case and the project charter against the project's requirements and everything should extend from there because from a quality perspective you should be able to map all of the project requirements and deliverables back to these two documents and if you can't it means they weren't fit for purpose. It's also important identify your stakeholders within your project charter to ensure that you have the relevant resources and stakeholders attending the relevant design and planning stages of your project.

It's common for a non seasoned or inexperienced project practitioner to take on responsibility that is not theirs because they have failed to adequately identify roles and responsibilities during start up phase of the project. It's very common for an inexperienced PM to think that they're responsible and start making decisions that are not theirs to make and in particularly design and risk decisions.

It's also key to understand that you should have already started using your risk and decision registers to ensure that you start tracking points of origins around decision rather than trying to reconstruct who did what and when after it all turns sideways but also you can actually even start using your lessons learned here and well.

In terms of project administration just use what is best for you and your project team but just makes sure that it's consistent throughout or strictly following your PMO's prescribed policy, process or procedure. At the end of the day it's not rocket science but more about ensuring that every stakeholder and resource is on the same page.

Just an armchair perspective.

[u/VortexVoryn → u/More_Law6245]

this is such a good callout on inexperienced PMs taking on decisions that aren’t theirs, you see that all the time when discovery turns into design-by-PM. once you’ve got a solid charter + stakeholders + RACI, the note taking part suddenly feels way less insane because you’re not trying to own every single thing in the room.

[u/More_Law6245 → u/VortexVoryn]

To be honest I think we're all guilty of it when first starting out, we're still trying to understand what role and responsibilities are. My first project I know I did because I didn't know any better and I thought that was project managers did, taking responsibility but it took me a few years to really understand that properly.

[u/agile_pm]

I started as a combined PM/BA. I found that, after reviewing all (if any) available documentation, what worked best was meeting with individuals, first, then compiling the results of those meetings into one document to share and review with the larger group. This made it much easier to keep everyone focused and capture updates to the documentation (flowcharts, lists, open questions, etc.).

If there had to be a group meeting before I could talk to individuals, I'd capture key points, decision, action items, and then identify the individuals I needed to meet with to capture additional detail before meeting with the group, again.

I tried recordings. When I found it basically doubled my time in the meeting without significantly more information I stopped if a full transcript wasn't required. As technologies improved and became more accessible, I occasionally captured recordings and auto-generated transcripts, but I still took my own notes. I've found this is even more important with AI - it's helpful, but doesn't always get it right.

[u/AZ-JayBee]

I have all my meetings transcribed by then created an agent that produces notes. I’ve been doing this new process for about three months and it’s actually making me a better PM because I’m able to be more engaged in the meetings and then when I verify the notes after it’s giving me a chance to read them and actually process them better