Actions arising

It is likely that a number of actions will be agreed at trustee meetings. Any agreed actions should have owners and timescales clearly recorded.  

It is important that trustees and their advisers have the time to follow up on their actions. Ideally there will be a scheme secretary in place who chases up actions between meetings and records the current status. This will hopefully avoid last minute panics, and matters needing to be deferred to future meetings because they have not received the required attention between meetings.

It can be difficult to keep track of progress with actions when there are many. Many trustees have found having action logs helpful. These are summary documents, often in a table format, which enable users to see both the current status of actions and also to establish when discussions on a particular topic took place. It can be helpful, particularly for larger schemes, to use a spreadsheet format so that actions can be sorted by owner, subject or date due. A scheme’s action log should ideally be accessible to trustees and their advisers and updated when matters are progressed so that it shows the up-to-date position at any time. Remember to add any actions that come up between meetings to the action log.