Senior IS Project Manager| Baycare Health SystemsClearwater, Fl, United States
Do you include the basics like a project charter and project schedule? Do you include business case? Contracts? Meeting Minutes? Technical documents? Anything else?
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Luis BrancoCEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, LdªCarcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
I would certainly store core governance artifacts such as the business case, project charter, approved plans, major changes, key risks, contracts, significant decisions, and formal acceptance records.
Meeting minutes and technical documents can also be important, but I generally prefer to keep detailed working documentation in specialized repositories and link it to the PPM when appropriate.
For me, the real distinction is this:
A PPM system should not try to become the organization's document archive.
It should become the organization's project memory.
The most valuable information is often not the documents themselves, but the traceability of decisions, approvals, commitments, changes, and lessons learned.
I used to store everything, until I realized that, barring a few lines in the Lessons Learned documentation, unless it was a Capital project that was going to be audited after completion, nobody other than me was going to look at any of it, ever.
I became a little more careful about this following a records retention project that I managed. You shouldn't keep everything forever. There are some documents, communications, etc. that need to be kept for a set amount of time, but after that, or for things that aren't required to be kept, you're increasing the potential for unnecessary:
- Discovery costs during litigation (I also learned that you shouldn't keep company information on personal devices, or the devices may become subject to discovery requests, opening up personal information to unnecessary discovery - we were told some stories that we laughed at, but would be embarrassing to experience personally) - Privacy and cybersecurity risks - Storage and management expenses
If/where our projects are repetitive, I create templates to account for the commonalities. The way I manage lessons learned accounts for future considerations. If there is something critical from a project that I'll need to keep, I'll keep it. I don't store more than I have a reasonable suspicion to believe I'll need in the future, and if I haven't needed it within two or three years, I'm unlikely to need it again. Saving Changes...
Program Manager| HARPER SRLSanto Domingo / Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic
In our case, we usually store the business case, project charter, schedule, RAID log, status reports, key approvals, and closure documentation. Depending on the project, we may also include contracts, requirements, architecture documents, meeting decisions, and other artifacts that are important for governance, audits, or knowledge transfer.
The goal is to keep enough information to understand what was approved, what was delivered, and why key decisions were made. Saving Changes...
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