Welcome to the “fascinating world of project management!” Some love it, some hate it. However, project management is always helpful when you need to perform complex tasks.
I would recommend that you create your IT documentation based on project management principles. Creating an IT documentation is no huge project, but it has all aspects that identify this task as a veritable project. You will need the following resources: time and staff. Time will be needed because all the information must be gathered, and staff will be needed because somebody’s got to do this. Not all steps must be carried out by highly qualified staff. Especially digitising the documents for license management can be done by temps or holiday workers. And these are one-off tasks because the documents only need to be digitised once. At the end of the project, however, all ongoing tasks must have been integrated into the daily operations.
Project management is suitable to help you with all these points. If you are already familiar with this way of working, you will certainly agree, if not, give it a try. It is fun because it really works!
Use our sample project schedule
I would like to provide you with a project schedule. You can use it as a template and adapt it to your own project requirements. It contains a number of tasks you need to consider and take care of. The list is not intended to be exhaustive, and you are not compelled to work on all of the points mentioned there. Everybody who is involved in project management knows that no two projects are alike. The schedule is intended to serve as a (hopefully) valuable support. It will help you get started and guide you through the required tasks. You will notice that you will not need to perform some of the tasks listed there while some required tasks might be missing.
Keep track of your project
We strongly recommend that you use an open issues list. Save it in such a way that only the person who is responsible for it has write access to this file. This list will prevent you from forgetting any tasks. In project management, tasks should be carried out in parallel, with the additional objective to keep the overall project duration as short as possible. You can document pending tasks in order to make sure they will not be forgotten. In the meantime, continue with another issue – while always keeping track of things.
Assigning tasks
Project management is preferred by many because it helps you distribute the tasks to different persons. This will shorten the overall project duration. Also apply this approach when creating or refining your IT documentation. The tasks of collecting passwords and entering them into the Docusnap database must not necessarily be performed by the project lead – any other member of the IT staff can do that. The same is true for license management: Here again, many documents and a wealth of information must be gathered. Distribute these tasks among the staff. This way, you will achieve your goal more quickly.
