As a project manager, you have plenty of things on your plate. You have to ensure that your team is communicating and making progress forward. You have to communicate with stakeholders and managers. You have to continually inspect and revamp your project plan to account for new variables that threaten to derail it. With the sheer number of other tasks that need to be done, it can be easy to dismiss things like documentation and reporting as nonessential, pushing them to the back burner. Don’t do it. How important are these things?
Documentation
Your team will generate a considerable amount of data throughout the project. It might be related to material prices and performance in product manufacture. It might be related to specific hard drive stability and longevity within an IT project. In reality, that information will most certainly be vast and varied, and in all cases important. You must ensure that you’re documenting that data properly, and recording it against future need.
Perhaps the best tip possible related to documentation within your project is to ensure that each of your team members understands the importance of recording data and reporting it correctly. Make sure they have the software and templates necessary to streamline these processes. For instance, Excel and Word templates allow your team members to simply plug data into preformatted slots, taking a considerable amount of time and effort out of the scenario and ensuring that they can get back to their regular responsibilities that much faster.
Reporting
Once your team members have recorded all the necessary data, it needs to make its way to you (in most instances). You will have your own responsibilities where this information is concerned. For instance, you’ll have to report some information to stakeholders, whether they’re in your organization or in a client company. It’s vital that you report this information for a variety of reasons, including the possibility that this data will have a direct impact on your project’s budget. For instance, changes in the price of materials needed for manufacturing a product will most certainly have a huge impact on your project’s budget, whether for good or ill. Information about the availability of a material from a specific supplier can also impact your project, both in terms of budget and in completion time.
Have Documenting and Reporting Tools Already on Hand
For project managers in need of additional help with documenting and reporting, the most important thing to understand is that there are tools out there that can streamline this process. You’re not limited to premade templates alone. You can work with mobile apps that offer the ability to immediately send raw data or full reports with the press of a button to anyone who needs to be kept in the loop. That certainly saves time and effort. From desktop software to mobile apps, there are timesaving tools that will help you be more productive, while still ensuring accuracy and communicability.