It’s Not About the Documents!

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  New Practitioners   Risk Management  

I was recently contacted by a new project manager who was very upset because they had experienced a lot of problems on their first project, and didn’t understand why. At one point, this PM said to me, “I worked with the team to complete the RAID log, and we updated it every week, but we still had all kinds of problems with the items in it, and I don’t understand why.”

In this case, the problem actually was the RAID log, which keeps track of risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies. I see this problem happening more often. Projects make use of a lot of different types of documents and templates, and they all serve a very useful purpose—but we have to remember that they are only tools. They don’t do a project manager’s job for them; they simply help that job to get done. Like a lot of new project managers, this PM didn’t fully appreciate that—and ran into trouble.

While we expect to interact with project plans on a regular basis, there is a temptation to view things like RAID logs as a form of completion. Take risks as an example: They’re identified, analyzed, prioritized, assigned to an owner, and an appropriate management and contingency approach are identified. Then all of that information is captured and reference to it is made in the RAID log, which summarizes everything. But none of those things are stable…

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