Episode 180 –  Fuel Your Project with the Power of Dynamic Documentation

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Will your project’s documentation pass the test of time once the project is done and the people are gone? Documentation is at the intersection of information management, organizational design, and personal productivity. Accurate documentation makes teams more efficient and effective. Table of Contents 01:23 … Essential Project Documents03:43 … Defining Information Management04:34 … Adrienne’s Story05:59 … Performing an Information Audit09:19 … Signs Your System is Out of Control11:33 … Dynamic Documentation12:44 … Improve Your Documentation15:19 … Budget for Closing Documentation16:57 … Finding the Right Balance19:12 … Kevin and Kyle20:27 … Strategies for Meeting Notes23:49 … Have a System25:54 … Getting Everyone Onboard27:25 … Documentation No-Nos30:06 … Personal Productivity31:06 … “The 24-Hour Rule”31:41 … Contact Adrienne32:43 … Closing ADRIENNE BELLEHUMEUR: I actually say documentation is at the intersection of information management, organizational design, and personal productivity.  So documentation kind of underpins these three major disciplines, but the personal productivity is often forgotten. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer.  We’re talking today to Adrienne Bellehumeur, and she is the founder of Bellehumeur Company and co-partner of Risk Oversight.  She’s based in Calgary, Alberta.  She’s also an expert on productivity, documentation, governance, risk, and compliance; and has delivered 15 years’ experience as an auditor, accountant, analyst, problem solver, and independent consultant. Adrienne developed a documentation approach called “dynamic documentation,” and she’s a published author of the book “The 24 Hour Rule,” and she’s going to tell us more about that book, as well. Adrienne likes to talk about processes, tools, and methods, and some of the best strategies to use to maintain effective, efficient, and timely documentation.  So as you may have gathered, we’re talking about documentation and information management.  So Bill, my question to you is what are some essential project documents that project managers should be maintaining? Essential Project Documents BILL YATES:  Oh boy, the list goes on and on.  They’re all essential, every one of them.  Let me start with the legal stuff first.  I think project managers who’ve ever done work with, either with outside contractors or their customers, an external customer, they would agree anything related to contracts, addendums, agreements, even the email threads where those may have been negotiated or key decisions were made, those should be considered mandatory.  You’ve got to have those backed up.  They can’t just be living on your hard drive.  They need to be backed up.  Also things like the project charter, anything with signatures that gives authority to the project. And then kind of going down the list, there’s scope things like requirements, scope statement, the product roadmap, the backlog, change requests, logs that keep up with things, task lists, or issue logs.  These are dynamic.  These need to live.  So you have to document them almost with a date stamp on them.  That’s true with a risk log or risk register, as well.  Major communications, major rollouts, maybe you hit a milestone or something significant, you want to keep those documents.  Think about, okay, could someone who doesn’t know anything about this project take a look at it six months, two years later and go, “Oh, okay.  Yeah, I get it.  I see why you guys made that decision.  I see who was involved in it and then what action took place after.” And then one of the biggest challenges, and I think we’ll hear this from Adrienne as well, when you’re getting ready to wrap up your project, that is one of the most difficult times to make sure that you’re doing good documentation.  It’s like more important than ever.  It’s almost like think about when you move into a house.  You have this checklist, the punch list, the final step before you go sign those contracts to own the house.  Well, for our projects, too, we’re trying to wrap things up, but we’re losing key resources.  The team is starting to get dispersed to more projects, and we have to gather that information out of their head and make sure that it’s been documented somewhere for future, for lessons learned, both for this project and into the future. WENDY GROUNDS:  Thanks, Bill.  That’s a lot to keep in mind.  Let’s see what Adrienne has to say, and let’s get some advice from her on how to correctly manage our information and our documents. Hi, Adrienne.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you for talking with us today. ADRIENNE BELLEHUMEUR:  Thank you.  Thank you so much for having me. Defining Information Management WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, the first thing is, I think just to kind of put an explanation out there, could you define what information management is really all about? ADRIENNE BELLEHUMEUR:  So information management is basically the management of existing information.  If I have this piece of paper here on my desk, and I do something with it and put it in the right spot, I’d call that information management.  It’s actually a wide range of things that can be anything from organizing the files on your computer all the way up to an enterprise content management for a multinational company.  So it actually has a wide range.  Information management is a close cousin of documentation, which is my area of expertise, but a very wide discipline that often incorporates a lot of technology and tools and metadata and taxonomy and stuff like that in practice. Adrienne’s Story WENDY GROUNDS:  So where does your interest in information management and documentation originate?  How did you start out? ADRIENNE BELLEHUMEUR:  Oh, that’s a great question.  I mean, it spans many years.  I actually had a bit of a nerdy fascination with notes, taking notes in class.  And I remember having lots of cool notebooks, and looking around the classroom, wondering what are people doing with their notes.  This interest actually spanned throughout my career.  I’m a chartered accountant by background.  And I do remember how important documentation and managing information is in the workplace, and how actually poorly we train people when we enter the workforce.  So I’ve had a big interest in helping people to be better trained because I actually didn’t think the training was that good. And then as a business owner and consultant, I watched so much money being wasted in companies by consultants leaving without anything written down.  People can’t find documentation that they spent millions of dollars on a project, tons of money on resources that we have meetings and no record of what was said, and we can’t remember.  So this kind of threefold reason, it’s actually spanned many years.  I’ve seen so many patterns of a need for students, professionals, the knowledge workforce to have a better understanding of this practice. Performing an Information Audit BILL YATES:  This is so good.  I feel like we’re going to the doctor today.  And you are our specialist.  But let me just start out with this idea of an information audit. For our project managers that are out there, let’s say you performed an information audit on one of their projects.  What questions would you be asking the project manager and the team in that audit? ADRIENNE BELLEHUMEUR:  Often information audits are really tied to a problem you’re going to solve.  So if people can’t find something, or they’re struggling to get people to document, or Larry built your system from scratch and is retiring in two months, or Sally is the only person who knows how to run critical process.  Like I’m often brought in for very specific problems. But if I were running a more generic audit, which I do, I really focus on how users interact with their information.  I ask questions like what information or knowledge do you care about if someone won the lottery?  We don’t say “hit by a bus” anymore.  We say “win the lottery.”  What is actually getting used or not?  Can people follow, I call it the re-performance standard?  Can people use the standalone documents to actually do their job?  Or, and this is applicable to project managers because they often have to hand it off to others, it has to meet that re-performance standard.  Can it meet the clarity standard?  Do people understand what you mean without having to interpret it? The operative word I’m getting at here is “standalone.”  In today’s workforce, we need to build documentation systems that people can use the content and materials.  And this is broad, too.  It covers stuff like video and systems, SharePoint, everything.  When I say “documentation,” I’m not necessarily meaning a piece of static paper, but they have to be able to find things, understand, do their work, basically in the absence of the people who built them.  And this is just a new reality of the workforce. We have a new knowledge-based economy geared to how a project’s documentation and systems will sustain once the people are gone. BILL YATES:  I love that you use that keyword of “standalone.”  To me, I think that’s important to point out because I know I have certainly been a guilty party and thinking, okay, I was in the room when we made this key decision with the customer.  This defined the scope that we ended up delivering.  And I can just make some basic notes because I’ll remember just enough to jog my memory.  Well, that’s not really standalone.  Let’s say I get assigned to a different project.  To your point, it needs to be something that someone can pick up and read without me explaining it or without me being on the other end of a call.  And it needs to be standalone.