DOCUMENTING PROJECTS

Documenting Projects > Post 127 ⇒  by Gautam Shah

.

 

Projects evolve through several levels of activities, by Financial advisers, Project consultants, and Designers. These project convening agencies take into consideration feedback or feed-forward of various stack holders, actual or likely users-owners, sponsors, regulators, fabricators, vendors and servicing agencies. Each of the project convening agencies need to deliver their products to others. As a result the transfer is formal and well documented. The project documents do not need to be collated, as one document becomes the basis of subsequent one. Each of the project convening agencies does not blindly follow the content, but recheck it. The project, as it passes through multiple agencies matures well.

● Defining the project objectives (concepts, policy, analysis, design, quality parameters, concerns)

● Defining the means and methods of achieving the objectives (assessing, choosing)

● Planning the resources (estimating, procuring, allocating)

● Time and Space scheduling

● Delineating the project into various categories, components and tasks

● Organizing and foreseeing the project actualization

● Setting evaluation and preview methodologies

● Assessing, controlling and providing for the risks

● Implementing a feed-forward and feedback system for project execution and operations phases.

These aspects (as listed here above) are projected differently by different consultants (project convening agencies) as per their area of intervention and presented at different stages of a project. Designing agency is last but one to intervene in the project. The last ones to step in are the project operations agencies. But it is the design agency that acts as the de-facto coordinating entity.

Design agency collates the different documents are mechanisms through the deliverable product -the design. However, where owners, conveners, planners, designers, vendors, executioners, supervisors and operators converge, the documentation may get obliterated due to in-distinctive roles. These happen with organizations, who own, execute and operate a project as single entity.

 

Some of the Project documents created by the involved parties are:

▫ Project Charter, Project Profile Report, Business case model, Feasibility Study, Scope Statement, Terms of reference, Project Management Plan, Project Initiation Document

▫ Work Breakdown Structure, Assignments, Task lists, Schedules,

▫ Accommodation of Alterations, Change Control Plan,

▫ Communication Plans, Network structure, Reportage system, notifications,

▫ Risk Register, Risk probabilities, Risk extent, Risk Management Plan (avoidance, mitigation, factors of safety, margins), Risk compensations

▫ Governance Model, Administrative strategies

▫ Export - Import / Entry- exit Logs

▫ Actions history Lists

▫ Resource Management Plan

▫ Project Schedules, Targets

▫ Status Reports

▫ Responsibility - authority structure

Such documents once had restricted access and available to only relevant project members or owners. However, with modern quality management systems, it is desirable to make them available to all project participants and stack holders. Such documents are hosted on shared resources like web-pages.

 

Public projects, Historically long lasting (monumental) projects and projects with large scale risks and other difficult to predict liabilities are not only well documented through all stages of the Project Life Cycle but such documents are desirably made as open documents for public scrutiny..

.