My Professional Journey

A new Project starts . As a Project Manager, you are full of enthusiasm , embarking on the exciting new challenge .

Your project will deliver an exciting new product, an upgrade or a process improvement. Whatever be the case, the documentation - Solution Architecture, Support Plan, System Test Plan, User Acceptance Testing Report , these are all the proof that it will be delivered according to what the customer wants.

After a workshop(Or many) the documentation and artifacts that your project will deliver is agreed. That's the easy part.

And yes we have also established why some of these are more important than others because:-

1. We need them for auditing and regulatory requirements.
2. This is a waterfall project and not producing them is unheard of.
3. We have vendors and third parties delivering the project for us.Therefore we do need them to produce documentation so we can support the solution moving forward.

Perhaps agreeing on who will approve and review the documents is also the easy part. maybe even agreeing on the method of approval - wet signatures, electronic signatures or email approval are easy. The production of the documentation is also not the difficult part.

Then what exactly is the difficult part and the reason for writing this article? It's the review of the documentation.

Often stakeholders may assume ownership as reviewers and approvers of documents but when it actually comes to requesting them to review or approve, you could be facing one of the many challenges

1. They are busy on another project.
2. Their managers have given them the task of a higher priority than reviewing your document.
3. After several review cycles and to-ing and Fro-ing, they seem to pick something new in the document which they have not hitherto talked about.
4. Their delegates also confirm to points 1 , 2 , 3.
5. Your document is to be reviewed by different groups of stakeholders with different interests in the outcome of this project and it's often a nightmare to get consensus on the contents of the document based on feedback from the many groups.
6. The reviews may be too granular than what the document intends to convey or their comments may not be entirely relevant to the document they are reviewing.
7. You have had walk-through of the document with them, however they are still not happy.

No matter how electronic or automated your process becomes, there is always a human being behind that computer who needs to approve the work that your project is delivering.

Yes there may be effective strategies to review and approve Project documentation . what are some of these innovative strategies? I request some inputs.