Document and Project Management
Tom Mochal, TechRepublic
Early in my career, I was assigned to two large projects.
As you might expect, the project team struggled with scope, risk,
communications, etc. However, the thing that I remember was the most
troubling was document management. Both of these projects generated a lot
of documents and very early in the project it became apparent that things
were getting out of control. We had duplicate documents and documents we
couldn't find at all. Some documents were located on team members' hard
drives, and everything in a different format. In other words, we had a
mess!
That experience taught me that the management of
documentation is a fundamental part of larger projects, and it's why
document management is one of the core components of our TenStep Project
Management Process.
Document management is totally practical. The project
manager should think ahead of time about how documentation will be managed
so that he or she does not end up in a situation where storing and finding
documents is an obstacle to completing a project successfully. Imagine the
embarrassment of missing your end-date and having to tell your sponsor it
was because no one could ever find the documents they were looking for.
The larger the project, the more rigorous structure is
needed to manage documents. The following areas should be considered part
of an overall document management plan.
- Determine where to store documents. This is a no-brainer. The
project team should have a common area, or repository, for storing
documents.
- Define a logical and physical document organizational structure.
Once you know where you will store documents, you should also determine
the directory or folder structure and define what types of documents go
where.
- Define naming standards. Don’t let everyone call documents anything
they want. Provide the naming conventions so that you can instantly
tell what type of information is in each document.
- Determine if some documents need versioning. The project manager
should determine whether multiple versions of documents will be saved
or if just the latest version will be saved. If multiple versions are
saved, you'll need some type of versioning technique to make sure
people know what version they're reading.
- Determine if (and how) you will track document approval status.
This lets you know if a document has "final",
"draft" or "awaiting approval" status. Again, if
you don’t manage the documents, people will read drafts and think they
have the final version.
- Define standard document formats. It's easier to read and create
documents if they all have a standard format, fonts, headers, footers,
etc.
This type of work may sound tedious, and some of it is.
However, all large projects need to work through these areas, and more. If
you are a proactive project manager, you will set up these standards ahead of
time. If you are reactive, you'll still set up these standards, only you'll
have to do it after you and your team become overwhelmed by documentation
during the project.
