When faced with revising three to five hundred documents during the course of a single project, it's easy to get overwhelmed. You may ask, “Where do I even start?” or “How do I prioritize all this work?” You may begin to doubt if the project milestones in front of you are truly achievable.
Enterey’s team of experienced life science consultants specializes in managing life science project management documentation updates as part of our strategic planning and process improvement solutions. When faced with documentation challenges, we have found success in defining and sticking to four specific best practices to align resources and keep work moving forward to completion.
It’s not uncommon for each stakeholder group to want to track their own documents when managing change across a complex project. Avoid the temptation to have multiple trackers and different sources of truth. Having one source of truth helps to:
Using a tool that allows you to manage a large set of data across multiple stakeholders, while keeping track of changes, will help you keep your sanity as you execute the project.
During document identification and assessment, group and categorize documents as much as possible. Grouping documents helps make revisions more manageable than navigating through each document individually. Once groups have been identified, they can follow different defined plans of attack and be prioritized by risk vs. impact.
Some ideas to consider when grouping documents are:
Developing alternative, innovative solutions begins with a thorough understanding of your company’s Document Management System (DMS) and its document approval process. It’s okay to learn more about the document approval process as you go, or you can collaborate with someone there who knows the document approval process really well. Knowing the existing available technology and functionality can open new alternative ways to save time and money. Some items to consider include:
The old adage, “There’s no ‘I’ in team” rings just as true with document revisions. One of easiest (and simultaneously hardest) things to manage with document revisions is not the revising of the document content itself, but the communication and teamwork involved with the people. Document revisions are a teamwork activity. It involves one or more document editors, document reviewers, and document approvers from different functional areas. Therefore, the level of constant communication and teamwork can determine how successful the document revisions will be. Some items to consider include:
Are you optimizing efficiencies and compliance with your documentation management strategic planning processes? Use Enterey's free Portfolio Project Management assessment tool to analyze your PPM efficiencies. Or, schedule a meeting with Enterey’s Life Science consulting team today to learn more about streamlining output and results across your operational models.
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