The Document Life Cycle

When a team member says they can complete a document in two weeks, are they saying that document will be ready to circulate in two weeks, or that the document will be completed and totally approved in two weeks? It is important for the Project Manager to recognize the stages that a document must go through from creation to completion. These steps should be built into the workplan. Not all documents need to go through all the stages of document creation and approval. However, depending on the document, one of more of the steps will be required. Some of the review steps defined here would also be considered part of a quality control process for the documents.

 Initial Document Creation: In this step, the document is created initially. If there are no subsequent reviews, then this step results in the creation of the final deliverable. Most of the effort hours associated with the document are used in this step. Subsequent steps may take a long duration, but they do not take nearly as much effort.

 Feedback and Modification (Iterative): These two steps involve circulating the document for initial review and feedback. Based on the review comments, the document is updated. Depending on the particular document, this may be an iterative process. For instance, a document may have an internal review, followed by a stakeholder review, followed by a management review. After each of these reviews, the document is subsequently modified based in the feedback and sent to the next step.

 Approval: When the document has been circulated for feedback and subsequently updated, it will be ready for final approval. Some documents should be formally approved in writing. Others are simply considered complete after the final round of feedback is received.

 It is possible that any completed (production) deliverables may require subsequent updates. If so, the updates may require their own feedback / modification / approval cycles as well.

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