Is All This Documentation Really Necessary?

In 40 years of practicing project management (and teaching) the question that I’ve heard most often is “Why do we have to do all this documentation?”

Many say that we do it because it’s in the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) and considered best (or good practice depending on what version of the PMBOK you reference.) Prior to the 6th edition you might respond “Not everything in this guide should be applied uniformly to all projects, it’s up to the project manager and the project team to decide what gets used and to what degree of rigor it gets applied.”

In the 6th and later editions, the emphasis shifted to using the term “Tailoring” which means that we use what is appropriate for the complexity, duration, type and environment of the project. If you ask the project manager why they undertake to do the documentation, you might hear one of the following responses:

• The company requires it.
• The project management office (PMO) requires it.
• The program/portfolio manager requires it.
• I just finished getting my PMP certification and I learned that this is just something we are required to do.

Ultimately, the answer should be that it helps the project manager and team do their jobs and do it better. It should assist in the project realizing the benefits promised in the business case. For this to be true let’s look at how this assists the project manager.

In the beginning the project manager doesn’t know everything about the project, but as the project manager moves through the project, they learn more about the project. At the end of the project everything is known.

Completing and maintaining the documentation lets the project manager understand what he or she knows and what they don’t know. This allows the project manager to learn about the necessary information required to successfully complete the project.

Aside from documentation, there are many other “tools” that project managers use to understand good practices. Expert opinions, document reviews, and lessons learned are some of these tools. Lessons learned are an excellent way to honor continuous improvement, both in product and process improvement. Lessons learned should be collected from initiation through closing a project. These should be captured in a register for that specific project. When closing a project, these project lessons learned registers should be transferred to an organizational repository for all lessons learned on all projects collected.

Unfortunately, this is where lessons learned often end. The purpose of lessons learned is to be used to improve the way we manage projects. To accomplish this, individuals that work on projects need to be made aware of these lessons. These lessons need not only be made available passively, but actively used in training, retraining, talked about, and reviewed. These lessons can be the best source of improvement… If actively used.

To sum up, the reason for all the documentation we use, including lessons learned, is to ensure we explore all sources of information to aid in the successful completion of every project. To ensure we ask questions on information we should know, but perhaps don’t.

“Knowledge is power”… If you take advantage of it and use it to grow and improve.