3 TIPS: DRIVING VALUE WITH DOCUMENT CONTROL
TIP #1: STANDARDIZE DOCUMENT CONTROL EARLY
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TIP #1: STANDARDIZE DOCUMENT CONTROL EARLY
There's a notable difference between a $10 million project and a billion-dollar megaproject. However, no matter the scale, the fundamental truths of document control stay the same. Documents need to be well organized and accessible. Handoff needs to be clean and efficient. Resources and time must be well managed and diligently logged. The difference is that smaller projects have more wiggle room for more relaxed document control practices because there are fewer documents and fewer eyes monitoring the outcome.
Just because a project's value leans closer to seven figures than ten doesn't give contributors free rein to manage documents as they wish. "When you have a small project, you can have [documents] on the dashboard of your truck and in emails and on an Excel spreadsheet. You can get away with it," Graham's Michelle Orizzonte explains. "If you make mistakes at the beginning of a large-scale project, it has larger consequences. Just because you can get away with something on a small project doesn't mean you should." Consider the teams that are most likely working on these projects — organizations frequently give low-risk projects to their newest employees. Therefore, the habits and practices new talent forms early in their career become the habits and practices they take to higher budget projects.
“What's funny about our industry is that you could have a job that's a million dollars and a job that's a billion dollars. The document management process is still as complicated on a million-dollar job as it is on a billion-dollar job. You still have to do all the same things.”
-Curtis Smith, Project Controls Manager, Sundt Construction
Instead of taking a project-to-project approach to document control, teams ought to standardize their processes so that new teams don't pick up bad document habits and, instead, can master those same skills in a lower-risk environment and quickly acclimate to larger projects. When teams refine their processes early in their career, they position the entire organization for success by reducing the need for new training, limiting mistakes, and improving their overall outcomes. According to Sundt's Curtis Smith, "Each job is going to be unique, but having those controls and having standardization has really helped us scale our work so we can go to the next job and people are trained and understand what they're doing so it's not a big change every time they go to another job."
To take standardization a step further, when organizations run every project through an identical process, it empowers decision-makers to collect cleaner, more reliable data throughout the project lifecycle and, in turn, convert data into actionable learnings. By keeping track of variables such as drawing iterations or types of RFIs received, teams can gather key insights that will help to offset future challenges.