Blog no. 3 – Importance of documentation in Project Management

I am sure most of you reading this article are good Project Managers, but this article will help you become the best as it’ll help you in boosting the overall performance and also in case of conflicts / issues.

I have learned this the hard way (over the course of 10+ years of Project Management experience). Initially, I have had many successful project implementations & have received many accolades.

But there were projects in which I spent a lot of time in course correcting & searching for key artifacts during M&C / Closure phase. I have been facing this issue since many years but couldn’t understand the root cause of it.

One day, I realized that there was one aspect which was missing in my projects – A Robust Documentation Approach

Project management is a combination of two words project and management. Our human brain is indeed very active but sometimes we forget a lot of things such as an upcoming meeting, discussion with team members, deadlines, sign-offs, etc. Documentation helps us to fulfill our daily as well as monthly or yearly objectives without skipping or forgetting anything. Following are some points that will help you to know the worth or significance of maintaining documentation in project management.

1. Remember your objectives: – Documentation helps you to remember your objectives throughout the project (which will also ensure that you are on-track). Most of the project managers set goals orally and deliver them to their team members during a meeting. This is not a good approach. You must write down all your goals and objectives so that you can measure your progress with the passage of time.
2. Identifying & maintaining project milestones: – Keeping documentation is also important due to the fact that it helps you to remember all the important upcoming project milestones. Above all, it helps you to remember key dates, figures and decisions for project reporting.
3. Effective task management: – For instance, if you have a project team of 20 individuals and every one of them is performing different tasks then will you be able to remember their names, skills and job tasks orally? It is near to impossible so you must maintain your documents to make work easier and simpler.
4. Focus on details: – Maintaining documentation in project helps you to remember every minute detail about your project such as your mission and vision, goals and objectives, processes to be used, final outcome (product or service) to be delivered, resources to be collected, technical help required.
5. Measure project progress: – Most important of all, keeping documentation helps you to measure your progress on regular basis. You can compare your estimated goals with the achieved goals by keeping documentation of your project. You can identify & forecast spill overs as well.
6. Be ready for queries: – Be ready for queries such as – “Who signed off this exit criteria?”, “Who agreed on this objective?”, etc. Documenting all key decisions will help you in tackling these queries.
7. Prepare for future: – You may write down any failure you faced in the past so that you may not repeat those strategies again in the future. Documentation helps you to prepare yourself for any unwanted situation that may come in the future.

Kindly share your thoughts on this topic, blog & please feel free to get in touch with me if you need any support (Details are available in the about me section of my page).

Thank you !