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. Keeping documentation is also important due to the fact that it helps you to remember all the important upcoming events. Above all, it helps you to remember important dates, figures and decisions. When you will write the responsibilities of every team member then it will automatically help you to monitor or analyze his progress accordingly.
For instance, if you have not maintained the records then how will you judge the efficiency or productivity of team members? For instance, if you have a team of 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. 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 product or service to be delivered, resources to be collected, technical help required.
Most important of all, keeping documentation helps you to measure your progress on regular basis. It will also help you to know the causes of your poor performance. You can compare your estimated goals with the achieved goals by keeping documentation of your project. 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. Apart from this, keeping documentation gives you a professional look and also helps you to create a good image in front of your boss.
Keeping documentation is a key to success. Now a day, almost every organization takes help of computers to record, maintain and update all their important documents on regular basis. Mehwish Majeed is an enthusiastic youngster, a business graduate and a well-known article writer.
She has written a large number of articles for various blogs. The project timeline document also allows the project manager to keep tabs on the workflow, to ensure that no individual is holding up the process, by being behind on their deadline.
This document ensures that deadlines are established for the different project components; thus ensuring the steady progression of the project. By outlining these key deliverables in a highly organized fashion, you will motivate your team to complete these elements, while adhering to all of your deadlines.
In the monitoring and controlling phase, the project manager oversees the process of creating the project. They will use documentation, such as a communication plan and a project timeline, to ensure that the project work is being implemented according to the plan. This phase comprises all the steps that need to be taken, before the project can formally be deemed to be finished. Once the project has been finalised, and before the celebrations start, you need to formally round things off by moving into the closure phase of the project documentation process.
This step requires the creation of a project closure sheet. This document is used as written confirmation that all the invested parties particularly if, for example, you are working with external companies such as marketing agencies approved the completed project. Effectively, they are agreeing that the project has been kept on track and that the expectations of all of its stakeholders have been met.
This document sets out what you have learned from the project, as a team. It gives everyone an opportunity to put forward formal suggestions for what you might do differently next time. This is a key piece of the documentation process, as it ensures that your team uses this experience to their advantage and spins a positive on any mistakes that may have been made , to ensure their continued growth and success in future projects.
At first, it might seem a rather daunting prospect to create this entire bank of documentation, from the ground up. Filestage also has a free online template for a project charter template. This document can be used throughout the project creation process, as a guideline and reference point, which your whole team regularly refers back to.
Project Smart has created a risk and issue log template that ensures that you have not only covered all of the details required for any risks and issues involved in your project but that you have outlined these in a clear, efficient manner. Filestage offers a free downloadable change request form and in addition a comprehensive guide about how to handle project change requests effectively.
If you need more information regarding this specific document you should definitely check out this blog article. Filestage has created a free online project timeline template. This online project sign-off sheet , created by Filestage, is available to download for free. It has a great project documentation format, which ensures that all of your key confirmation points are included.
The Project Management Qualification website has provided an online lessons learned register template. It acts as a handy guide for what you should include in this document and the best way for you to display that information. Keep on top of the documentation throughout the project creation process. You should keep a close eye on where your project is within the process, and ensure that the relevant documents are ready well in advance. These documents can be written using a variety of different tools, e.
Word, Excel, Google docs or sheets, PowerPoint, etc. Choose the best document type to suit the particular process. For example, the risk and issue log is best laid out in a table, so Excel would be the best tool for the job. Leave yourself plenty of space to create the documents, so you ensure that they are reliable, thorough, and of a high standard.
Maintain and update the documents throughout the duration of the project. Otherwise, if you and your team agree on a fundamental change in the project, ensure that all of the documentation, across the board — past, present, and future use alike — is updated accordingly. Use the document templates that you have created as flexible documents that are designed to meet the specific requirements of this particular project.
One way to do this is by sharing, reviewing, and approving the documents with your team, during and after the project has been closed. Ensure that you accommodate the shifting needs, agreements, and requirements of your evolving project, and adapt the documentation accordingly, so that it best suits your team and the project at hand.
Filestage is a fantastic tool that will help you achieve a solid document review and approval process. It provides an efficient collaborative platform, which your entire team can use to review and share their feedback on these pieces of documentation. After finishing the project, save the documents and archive them, so that you can use them as a detailed, formal reference point for this particular project, should you ever need it. You can go back and consult a document from this task and, if needed, replicate the phrasing or layout that you used successfully, before.
This easy-to-use, all-in-one review and approval platform lets users upload and share different file types, such as Word documents, presentations, Excel sheets or images and videos. You can invite various project members to give their feedback on new or updated documents. Features such as due dates mean you can ensure that approvals are finished in time and that you stick to your overall project deadline.
This tool can be used within your project documentation process to review and approve all of your key documents and project deliverables in one single place. Workzone is all about making project management an effortless process. This online software solution for project documentation provides a sophisticated yet user-friendly option, which is designed to suit the requirements of most medium-sized teams.
In addition to its document storage and sharing functionality, Workzone enables users to manage the influx of the various documents that come in from different individual contributors across the team, letting you easily track the progress of this workflow against the deadlines that you put in place.
TeamGantt is a project-documentation software solution that is remarkably visually led. Even, some of the project failures are witnessed due to poor resources management.
Resource management plan helps to identify resources required in a project. It also lays down the foundation for ensuring the adequacy of resources. Another important aspect is to assess and monitor the work performance. Reports help to understand resource requirements throughout the project. Preparing risk management plan and maintaining risk register helps the project manager to deal with potential or upcoming risks during projects.
Any project goes with low to high level of uncertainty. Managing risk is always a challenge to project manager during a project. By keeping it documented, a project manager can wisely frame the strategy to deal with the risks.
And hence, increases the chance of project success. A project manager cannot neglect the importance of stakeholder management. Project success depends on all these stakeholders as much as on a project manager. Stakeholders have different levels of interest and influence in a project. They should be managed well to pull the maximum support out of them.
Stakeholder management plan, hence, should be prepared to ensure the same. The project goes through some changes during the project cycle. Always, it is advisable to raise change requests to get change approvals formally. This document can save your credibility and prepares you well for success. Without this document in place, you may end up in project scope creep.
The confidence of management in you will fade away. The issue tracker is a document to record all issues raised during the project. A project manager should prepare an issue tracker and update it regularly. He should assign proper responsibilities to relevant individuals with timelines to fix these issues.
Also, tracking of timely issue resolution becomes significant to project success. It is always recommended for a good project manager to capture best or worse instances during a project. It creates a project history for learning and knowledge sharing.
Lessons learned, from the project work, help you in similar upcoming projects with sound estimations. These lessons learned should be retained by the organization as a repository. As we can understand that project documentation is applicable in all areas during a project.
A project manager should always give due importance to good documentation. Sometimes, documentation is not appreciated as a work of your project. Project success is defined by meeting project objectives within project constraints.
But to assure the success, you need the support of good project documentation. Updating documents is also an essential part of a good documentation. It gives you real-time information to make perfect decisions. It prepares you to take any course correction, whenever an anomaly is evidenced. Enables to set project objectives.
Helps in project planning. Gives you better hold on project status. Facilitates good communication. Puts governance in place. Prepares you to deal with any obscure risk. Helps with better resource planning and assignment. Makes project traceable. Keeps your focus intact. Helps to earn support from sponsors.
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