The Importance of Documentation in Projects

Project management is the most crucial component in ensuring that your projects are a success rather than a failure. In order to make sure that everyone knows what the project entails it is essential that you pay close and focussed attention to documenting the project.

The best way to start documenting any process or complicated project is to break the project down into bite sized chunks that are much more manageable. Managing a project as a whole can be overwhelming; but by breaking it down into smaller sub-projects, you will stand a much better chance of being able to monitor the project as a whole and bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.

However, before you can even start to look at documentation a project you first need to decide the scope and work team. Only after you have these things clearly specified and in place will you be able to commence putting together an accurate set of documentation relating to these areas.

To highlight this point, let’s take a look at an example. You might be the project manager for a team which is responsible for writing a user manual showing employees how to use a new computer system (with the introduction of the new computer system representing “the project” in this case. The manual will assist employees to use your in-house computer systems. Although this document will never be released to the outside world, the quality of it is still of paramount importance as any mistakes could affect relationships with external customers, for example.

You will have unfettered access to certain resources to complete this task, including:

- A team of technical writers.
- Loads of hand written notes/typed note from various people including the end users of the system.
- Firsthand experience with the computer system and a sound knowledge of its purpose.

Before you can begin any type of project, you need to make sure everyone knows what they are doing and, more importantly, can be held accountable. This, of course, can be only done by organising and documenting the project thoroughly.

So, what do you need to do?

We’ll continue with the computer system example above to illustrate these points.

As previously mentioned, you should start by splitting the project up into easier pieces to manage. You then need to decide what each of the project operatives will be doing and compile the documentation to show this. Once this is complete, you can then move onto identifying the optimum lay-out of the manual. The documentation should show the whole process from start to finish, who will be doing what, and how long it will take.

You can break the user manual up into phases, as you have a team of technical writers, it is sensible to break it into various phases.

For example:

Phase one: Using the computer system to control stock levels

Phase two: Using the computer system to manage deliveries

Phase three: Using the computer system to track ecommerce deliveries

In this situation where a user manual is being created, it is very important that each writer follows a template or an outline so that all of the finished pieces of work look the same and can fit together well.

You could also decide to interview people that use or created the computer system so that you can learn more about it, all of these are additional parts of the project.

Communication is a very important part of project management; although verbal communication cannot be overlooked actually documenting everything down on paper is also very important. Without it there are plenty of opportunities for misunderstanding and confusion. Documentation should help you to decide what needs doing, when it needs doing and how much it will all cost.

The importance of documentation and good documentation can help you with the risk factors of any project and will support greater quality when work is outsourced.

For more on this and other key aspects of Project Management, contact us at Picaso Consulting