During an assessment, only the assessment team (not the participants) takes notes.
All relevant team or mini-team members are required to take initial notes on questionnaire responses, document reviews, formal presentations, and interviews. These notes may be recorded either on ordinary note sheets or on specially prepared sheets that bear pre-scripted questions. Very experienced assessors sometimes take notes on the data worksheets ( "Transforming Notes into Observations") themselves.
All members of the team should take notes about the entire interview, but mini-teams should be especially careful to cover their special areas of interest. (Of course, it is difficult to take notes when it is a team member’s turn to ask questions, but it is expected that other team membersespecially their mini-team partnerswill take up the slack.)
Careful note taking is tedious and difficult but crucial for the assessment process. Not only will most of the team’s judgments be based on its interview notes, but also the fact that it is perceived to be gathering and reporting information accurately gives the team real credibility, which is critical to the organization "buying in" to the assessment results.
If the team does not gather accurate and usable notes, agreeing on the significance of what the team has discovered becomes extremely difficult.
Notes should record verbatim the statements of the participants being interviewed as much as possible. Because of the necessity for confidentiality, however, individuals are not named, though they may be indicated by a code or number. Also because of confidentiality, notes are not transmitted with other assessment materials to the assessment sponsor and are destroyed at the end of an assessment.
Team members should supplement the verbatim statements that comprise the bulk of their notes with reminders of the flow of the interview they observed. Both verbal and non-verbal information is recorded in interview notes. (Non-verbal information helps to remind the team, for example, that a participant appeared uncomfortable and may not have been entirely open in his answers. In such a case, it may be useful to schedule a follow-up interview.)
The notes should record the date, time, and subject of the session.
Above all, information should be tagged as it is being recorded to identify data that relates to a particular practice or KPA/PA. Notes, after all, are taken not only to jog the memory but as the first step toward discerning and sorting the very particular analytical grid of information on which the results of an assessment depend.
It is certainly useful for team members to have a mental picture in mind of the process area implementation indicator (PII) worksheets that will later need to be filled out when they begin to take notes. This will focus their attention. Experienced note takers may even want to use draft pages of the worksheets as the primary medium for their notes.
Notes may be taken by hand or with the aid of a computer. Interviews should not be tape-recorded, however, because recordings make people nervous and because they do not filter information in the same way that taking and organizing notes do.
As soon as an interview ends, notes should be reread and revised for clarity, adding things that might not have been recorded and clarifying sections that are confusing.