How to Manage Your Project Documents
Project document management is the process of storing, organising, sharing, and managing documents related to your project. These documents should include all information related to the project. This could be project plans, schedules, blueprints, contracts, and reports.
Now, it might seem simple, but considering the management of your project documents correctly gives you the best chance of carrying out a successful project. Managing your project documents poorly can lead to confusion and disorganisation within your team.
In this blog post, we will discuss why managing project documents is important, the types of project documentation, and how you can improve your document organisation.
Why is a Tidy Project Important?
Without a sophisticated and organised project folder structure, tasks, meetings and important documents can become difficult to manage, or even worse, get lost. A tidy project ensures that everyone involved knows where to find the information they need, reducing confusion and saving time. It also ensures efficiency by streamlining workflows and facilitating effective communication and collaboration among team members.
A well-organised project sets the foundation for success, enabling smoother execution of tasks, better decision-making, and ultimately, the achievement of project deliverables.
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Levels of Project Documentation Complexity
When managing your project documentation, it’s important to understand each specific document type has a level of complexity. The complexity level of a document helps decide how these documents are stored, maintained, and controlled.
Low Complexity Project Documentation
These are documents that are simple to manage, and do not require any maintenance. Examples include:
- Meeting minutes
- Images
- Quotes from suppliers and contractors
- Emails
Medium Complexity Project Documentation
Documents in this category typically need to be reviewed and agreed by project leaders. It’s likely that there will be multiple versions of each document, which is why these documents need to be managed correctly. These documents should be dated and numbered in a way that your whole team can clearly understand.
Without a proper project folder structure, you run the risk of using an older version of a document, and therefore your team will be potentially following the wrong processes.
Examples of documents in this category include:
- Project initiation documents (PIDs)
- Project resources
- Business cases
High Complexity Project Documentation
Documents in this category are fundamental to your project management role.
They usually need to be updated throughout the project. This could be at each stage of the project, weekly, or even every day.
Because of this, you will have a significant amount of versions of each document type, and you must ensure you’re working on the most up-to-date document each time. If you make a mistake with this, it could be extremely difficult to reverse.
Standardised Project Folder Structure
Although every part of your project will be different, keeping as many aspects as consistent as possible allows team members to move between parts of the project with ease.
By having a standardised folder structure across the project, team members will be familiar with how to access different files, and how to store them too.
To do this, it makes sense to have a top-level folder with the project name storing the key documents and project subfolders. There should then be two easily accessible documents at the top of this folder. The first is a list of contact details for the leading members of the project, and the second is a document explaining the filing structure.
Having the list of key contacts at the top of the folder allows all team members to be able to quickly and easily get in touch with leaders when important issues arise. These issues can then swiftly be resolved, and the project can continue moving forward.
The filing structure document is just as important. This allows all members to understand how and where to store documents, and also means they understand where to find documents they need.
We will now go into detail about the four subfolders that should be part of your document organisation.
Project Controls Folder
In the project controls folder, we recommend a separate folder for each document needed based on your preferred method. Just list and name them, and if a document isn’t needed for this project, mark it as “not used.”
Keeping this structure simple will allow all team members to follow and understand it. Examples of documents which could be in this folder are the stakeholder map, risk register, and work plan.
Communications Folder
In the communications folder, there should be a subfolder for each organisation involved in the project that there is communication with. For large-scale projects, this should be an extensive list.
Consider arranging the organisations in this folder alphabetically, or with the organisations you communicate with the most frequently at the top. All emails, phone call logs, and points of contact with each organisation should then be included in their folders.
Meetings Folder
This folder should contain the minutes and additional notes from every internal meeting conducted from the start to the end of the project. When naming these files, you should first write the date, and then the type of meeting. By doing this, the folders can easily be organised chronologically.
For example: 2024-05-14 – Deliverables Team Meeting
Deliverables Folder
The deliverables folder has folders arranged in a way that matches what’s happening within the project. These folders might include project stages, expenditures, subcontracts, and deliverables.
What are the Benefits of Effective Project Document Management?
Now that you understand how to create a standardised project folder structure, here are some of the benefits of using it.
Minimises Mistakes
Effective document management helps mitigate risks associated with errors, omissions, or miscommunications. By maintaining accurate records of project activities, decisions, and changes, it becomes easier to identify and address issues before they escalate.
Having different versions of each document makes document changes clear to spot. It means you can see what changes have been made and who made them. Therefore, project managers and leaders know who to speak to if they have any questions about the changes that have been made.
Easily Find Information
Another benefit of effective document management is that all of the documents live in one location. This means that all team members know exactly where they need to go when they’re looking for a specific file.
Because of this, your team members are not wasting time looking for documents, and can focus their time on important tasks.
Easy to Set up New Projects
Once you have established a high-quality project folder structure, you can use this same process for new projects. This means that new projects can easily be set up, and everyone who worked on the previous project will already understand how to navigate the document organisation.
Use Verto to Manage Your Project Documents the Right Way
To put all of this into action might feel like a huge task, but Verto comes with the perfect project management tools, including document management functionality, Kanban boards for task planning, and Gantt charts for timelines. Verto’s tools also help to improve your capabilities in areas such as stakeholder management and collaboration, with our website being a rich source of resources to get you started on any aspect of the platform.
If you’re a Microsoft Teams user, you can get the Verto 365 app to bring more of your work directly into Teams. This allows you to work and communicate on everything in one place, while keeping your own workload organised.
Book a demo for free today, or get in touch with our team to learn more how we can help you and your teams stay organised and productive from wherever your ‘office’ may be.