Keeping a Project Management Journal

Record keeping is an important part of the project manager's responsibilities. An excellent tool for record keeping is the project management journal.

eeping records is part of your job. As a Project Manager you have the responsibility of keeping records and documentation on the project. This record keeping is more than just tracking the project, more than keeping minutes of meetings, and tracking time against tasks. Project journaling is the process of logging events and decisions, documenting situations and recording changes in plans.

Project journaling is important. But many managers are disdainful of journaling -- they think of the journal as a CYB (cover your butt) document, useful only for self protection if things go wrong. Yet others think of journaling as "keeping a diary" and see it as a frivolous waste of time. But the project journal is a necessary tool for improving the project management process. I like to think of it as I would a ship's log. It gives you a way to examine the project timeline from a management point of view, considering more than just deliverables, tasks or costs, and maintaining a record of where you've been and why. This is just basic management work to avoid misunderstandings later in the project.

In the past, many project managers have preferred to write into a bound notebook. I knew of one such manager who had a complete shelf of journals for every project he had ever managed, throughout a long and successful career. Today, though most use some sort of electronic tool for journaling. A modern electronic journal can be used to store emails and attachments which are so prevalent in the current business environment. See our Software Reviews section for an example of software tools suitable for journaling.

At the very least, a project journal should contain your own notes on meetings, decisions made, actions taken, conflicts resolved and so on, including summarizations of verbal and phone conversations.  Additionally, you might want to keep a copy or summary of emails sent and a copy of any attachments sent with them. Finally, you may also want to keep an inventory with locations of project documents including things like goals statements, scope definitions, deliverables and requirements, breakdowns, schedules, resource performance reports.

One last thing that you want to be sure you keep is a record of any changes to the project that were made while it was in progress, the people who decided on the changes, and the anticipated impact on the project cst and schedule. This is the one area where misunderstandings are most likely to occur.

- Jake Alexander

 next article:  Creating a Project Work Breakdown Structure