#1 Problem Impacting Project Delivery
Queen E. J.
Expertise in Project & Program Management??Skilled in Project Execution - Healthcare, Technical, Software Implementation, and Customer Operations ??Transforming Complex Ideas into Actionable Success
You might have heard about the Twitter employee who was laid off, rehired, and fired.
When rehired, the former employee was asked to do documentation and provide code samples.
I'm almost 100% certain that the employee had all of the knowledge stored in their brain and was rehired only to document and share that knowledge with other employees and management.
What is the number one problem impacting project quality and delivery? It's not a lack of a project schedule or resources.
It's a lack of documentation or improper documentation. Something so seemingly simple yet often dismissed as non-important or overlooked by many project teams and leaders.?
If it isn’t documented, it didn’t happen.
In my seven-plus years of working with different client teams, only about 40% had proper documentation.
When I say "documentation," I'm referring to:
This article will explore the challenges and advantages of how documentation impacts project quality and delivery.
What Happens When Your Team Doesn't Have Documentation
Too many managers and teams rely on individualized knowledge. I've seen a few instances when someone who knew how something worked, or a particular process left the company, and everyone was in the dark, scrambling to make things work or figure out what to do next.
Too many teams overly rely on verbal communication instead of documentation.
How embarrassing would it be to call someone at home and ask them how to do something after you've fired them? Or worse, like the former Twitter employee, rehire and fire them again.
It's a terrible idea to depend on one person or a few for knowledge of internal processes and procedures.
After the full-time project manager left my client's company, I was hired to lead the large-scale multi-workstream software project. The project execution had already started about a month before I started; however, I couldn't tell where the team was currently in terms of status and what they'd already done.?
They also didn't have any flowcharts or documented processes, and only a few people knew the workflows when all the team needed to know for full transparency.
It took me a couple of weeks to organize the project and team to get everyone flowing in one accord.
When I created flowcharts and written processes for all the work needed to get the deliverables, I discovered a big chunk of work needed to be accounted for in the original project schedule.
As a result, I had to add two months to the revised project timeline, significantly impacting sales and marketing for a huge product release (they weren't happy).
领英推荐
Had someone done a diagram, flowchart, or written out the workflows in the planning stage, they might have caught the missing work and timeline.
Without proper and updated documentation, teams will have a massive risk of delivering projects behind schedule, poor quality, over budget, or out of scope.
Deliver Better Results With Documentation
The biggest gripe I hear about creating and maintaining accurate documentation is that it is time-consuming, or no one wants to be accountable for updating.
How much time and money will the impact of a lack of documentation cost you? A lot!
Creating and maintaining documentation for your team's work and projects isn't as time-consuming as you might think.?
It depends on how your teams are structured; you can assign a team member, project manager, or documentation specialist to keep track of changes, be responsible for updates, and use Confluence to store all documentation and share updates.
As a warning, you must be careful with too many or frequent documentation updates, which can cause confusion and misunderstandings.
Let's discuss a few examples of impactful documentation for your team and project.?
1). Workflows, Flowcharts, Roadmaps, Processes
Every task and process for your project should be documented in an editable file or software tool and shared with the team for complete understanding and transparency.
The example below is a flowchart for a content development process I created for a client project using Lucidchart.
2). Project Strategy, Planning, and Scope
I don't know about you, but planning a project in my head and then creating a schedule or timeline from scratch won't yield high-quality results for me. I gather all the requirements and strategies (if needed) for any new project using my custom project intake form (see below image).?
You can use your favorite project management software tool or a plain Google Doc to document your project strategy, planning, requirements, and scope.
3). Staffing or RACI Matrix?
A staffing matrix, often called a RACI matrix, will help you with in-depth resource and capacity planning. You can visualize project schedules, identify needs, task ownership, and consider your colleagues' capacities. There are many free templates available online.
The goal of having proper project documentation is to help your team stay organized, track progress and risks efficiently, have full transparency, and improve collaboration.
Let me know what you think about this topic (agree or disagree). I'd love to read your ideas and thoughts below.
As a bonus and thank you for reading this newsletter edition, I'm sharing a link to my ???? FREE resources. You can download checklists, ebooks, and more content exclusively for project management, customer support, and customer success professionals.