Sure it is, but the world is far from perfect. I'll agree if they can be, they should be. How do you deal with all the rest, the sensitive and important stuff? You going leave a first meeting with say some president of a business you might acquire and expect and email on it? Take this is a rule: People will not say as much in writing as they will verbally and it would be extremely foolish to ignore the info in between the two - that's the gold! As no memory is perfect, note taking is the only to capture the gold.
I mean if you talking something really pedestrian like what is our company's standard tolerances or policies on late delivery or how many widgets they're ordering...., fine, its easy to see it has to be in writing and easy to get in writing. But if you're in more important and less clear cut discussions like I listed, things don't get into writing often until several rounds have passed and maybe never. Meanwhile the ability to have total recall can be huge...and should it come to it, as I said, contemporaneous notes are evidence.
I don't think it to hard imagine a situation where better note wouldn't be advantageous
I agree, accurate note taking is required, I am not arguing against it, they teach about it in engineering classes - even your handwritten notes, when properly maintained, have substantial legal weight, equal to that of printed, controlled documents. If you have a series of notebooks with consistent notes with no pages torn out, dates and signatures where appropriate, they are held to a much higher standard than an odd collection of scribbles on the backs of dirty prints and scrap paper.
In my business, which was in the past primarily a foundry, customers would order castings over the phone all the time, as there was no email. A result of that was, castings were made incorrectly all the damn time, and even though there were notes taken during the conversation, they are all chicken scratched as many people in this thread have pointed out is common to happen during frantic note taking.
Yes, it is important to take into account all the information that is said in meetings, and to notate all the correspondence during said meeting would be counter-productive as you would probably not be able to both comprehend the ideas being tossed around a the same time as making clear, concise notes. But that is why note-taking is a skill, just like others that need to be developed and maintained, and is exactly the point of this whole thread!
So at the end of the day, when parts get returned for being wrong, but my
paperwork says otherwise, tough nuts buddy; the parts are made to specification according to the documents you provided me at the time of purchase, no subsequent documents were received indicating a change order.
An offhand phone call or conversation is not sufficient for placing a change order to a job in progress, or to specify any sort of quantitative technical document.
It is hard to get customers to abide by the rules, but that's the game we play, I always approach the customer with the requirement for documentation from the standpoint of "quality, low cost, and timely delivery" and it softens the pencil-pusher abrasiveness.
Anyone ever had a payment for a job delayed because your invoice didn't match their PO dollar amount, even though your invoiced amount is lower than their PO? It's that kind of crap that springs up unnecessarily when professional communication is not adhered to. It seems trivial, but those errors and hold ups stack up.
