Your Project Management Coach: Best Practices for Managing Projects in the Real World

Chapter 21

Documenting a Project for Posterity

Are you a project management trailblazer in your organization? If so, you may be the first one who has managed a project in a structured manner. Because of this, you have history and hard data to offer to project managers coming after you.

Or, perhaps you're the latest in a long line of professional project managers. You've been able to leverage the considerable project archives to help initiate and plan your latest project.

It's likely, however, that you're somewhere in the middle. You leverage the project work of others who came before you, and others coming later will be able to build off your project work. It's rather like the classic cheerleading pyramid, where you're standing on some shoulders, and others are standing on yours.

Providing project managers with metaphorical shoulders on which to stand is the purpose of the project archives. By collecting and storing important project files, you're capturing the institutional knowledge you've acquired working on your project and making sure this knowledge is readily accessible for others. Through this archiving of institutional knowledge, which is truly an organizational asset, you're recording hard-won data, capturing effective processes, and taking your organization to a higher level of efficiency.

Tip

Project archives are also essential for regulatory compliance and audits. You can turn to your archives if the project or your organization is subject to internal or external ...