The Art of Effective Project Documentation (Tools, Tips, and Tricks)
Adriana Girdler, CET, PMP
Helping project managers and accidental PMs successfully achieve project goals with an efficient, practical, non-chaotic system | Award-winning Project Manager | Workout & Guitar Enthusiast
What you need to know to be project documentation whiz!
Whether you love it or hate it, project documentation is pretty much unavoidable. It’s what keeps your team from fumbling around in the dark and wasting time and energy.
Done well, project documentation helps everybody on the team know what they need to do, when they need to do it, and how to handle any curveballs that come their way.
How do you get there? I have some tips to help you craft the perfect project documentation.
Get to the point in your documents
Trust me, nobody wants to read a 32-page charter.
Your project documents don’t need to cover every possible scenario – just get to the point of what your team needs to know.
Make your documents succinct, streamlined, and straightforward. That way your team can find what they need to know quickly and easily, and they’ll be more likely to actually use the project documents.
The last thing you want is for them to use a document once and file it away.
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Stop chasing your team and empower them instead
Information sharing on a project is a two-way street, but there’s a teaching component you have to do as a project manager.
Teaching your team how to use your collaborative project documents will really empower them.
They won’t have to chase you for information, and it’ll help them share status updates too.
That’ll keep you from having to chase after them – because nobody wants to be herding cats!
More tips for effective project documentation
There are other things you can do to make your project documentation effective. Check out the video I made sharing a few more strategies to promote collaboration, accountability, and productivity with your project documents. Follow me over to YouTube!
I go way more in-depth on project documentation in my SLAY Project Management online course where I show you step-by-step how to successfully manage a project. You’ll get every template you will need, along with detailed video instructions on how to fill them out.
Adriana Girdler, PMP | Creator of Slay Project Management?