Project Management Documentation

Project Management Documentation provides both a record of decisions and a means of documenting assumptions on which these decisions are based. Project Management Documentation can also help the Project Team focus on the tasks required at a particular stage in a project and so should not be viewed as superfluous to the project. Such Project Management Documentation is usually generated by the Project Manager or Team and approved by the Project Steering Committee.

The many tools and templates will speed your Project Management Documentation and tracking efforts, allowing you to focus on getting the work done, rather than merely recording activities. The minimum Project Management Documentation required as part of the assessment process is a Project File containing: statements of work for all activities, records of team meetings, a log of recorded changes to deliverables, comments from the team on completion of the exercise.

Project Management Documentation can take on many different forms to include design diagrams, hardware/software architecture specifications, item descriptions, repository queries, and reports. However, comprehensive Project Management Documentation is more than just producing printouts of these items. It should be focused towards a specific audience, have a clear purpose, include all relevant information, be produced on some regular basis, and be collated in an easy-to-follow progression. Meeting these requirements in an environment characterized by change is what makes Project Management Documentation difficult to generate.

The Problems in Generating Project Management Documentation: Generating Project Management Documentation is usually a manual, tedious process that can unquestionably consume numerous hours. It requires detailed knowledge of all the pieces that comprise your software development efforts. For instance, where do the pieces reside? What format are they in? What is the best way to present each piece, and in what order? Applying these questions to the various engineering artifacts such as requirement documents, project plans, hardware specifications, not to mention the hundreds of UML elements is indeed no easy task.

Nevertheless, all of these ingredients must be combined in order to produce understandable, comprehensive, and complete Project Management Documentation. In addition to the problems associated with generating project documentation, maintaining it is also an extremely difficult and time-consuming task. Soon after project documents are generated, or perhaps even before generation is completed, engineers are making modifications. Constant modifications make it hard, if not impossible, to keep project documentation complete and up-to-date. However, with the iterative and incremental development approach of UML-based design tools, some part of the system is likely to be under construction at any point in time.

Constant changes also add to the complexity of keeping the documents consistent in appearance. Government and regulatory standards, company policies, and even contractual stipulations further complicate this Project Management Documentation challenge.

The standard Project Management Documentation includes:

• Deliverables register
• Project plan
• Project reports - usually weekly
• Change control register
• Change control detailed forms
• Issues register
• Received acknowledgement register

Project Management Documentation in testing: Project Management Documentation is a very important aspect of any project and in the case of testing, documentation becomes even more important. The actual documents that are used by different project managers will be different but what is important is to ensure that the following issues are covered by the Project Management Documentation used:

• Strategy used for testing – how to approach the task
• Test plans – who? what? when? And resources?
• Test specifications – cases, results
• Test procedure – step-by-step definition
• Test data – provided or generated
• Test results – verified
• Test logs – fail or pass

There are a number of tools available for assistance in the testing process and the choice of the tools will depend largely on the type of system being tested for efficient Project Management Documentation.