The “Ugly in Focus” — Lack of Documentation

According to Kerzner, there are 10 uglies that can cause a project to fail or be delayed due to obstacles. Among those the worst of them in my experience is the “Lack of maintained documents”.

As mentioned by Kerzner “often when projects face a time crunch , the first thing that gets eliminated is documentation”.

• This not only impacts the project timeline but also proves as an obstacle for future projects using this one as a reference.
• In a technical environment , lack of description about why a certain bug was resolved in a particular way can lead to a domino effect and many more features could be impacted.
• The onboarding of a new team member is often affected by the lack of documentation and leads to wastage of time for everyone else on the team, delaying the project further.

As a new team member at a firm, lack of documentation causes chaos and delay frequently. Moreover, the task is often rotated between new members joining the team, who have no prior knowledge of the history of the project and cannot gauge how a small change could impact a critical feature. The documentation review task is not prioritized either.

The off-boarding of a critical team member often requires them to spend two weeks on documentation and knowledge transfer. But the lack of consequences causes employees to take this task lightly. New team members could take anywhere between 4–6 weeks to get the gist of the project , heavily impacting the critical path and wasting the time of important resources.

Through experience and reading case studies, I’ve learned how big a role documentation plays and is definitely necessary for the timely completion of a project or sprint. I’m definite that others might’ve experienced the same in their workplace, as its one of the most commonly existing Ugly!

#ProjectManagement #PMP #Documentation #BusinessAnalyst