Five Tips for Building an Effective Project Filing System

Want a project library that supports your project management practice and makes it easy to find information? An effective project filing system doesn’t have to be fancy and doesn’t require an expensive tool. Simply be purposeful about how you add project data to your system. Here are five tips for mindfully adding artifacts to your project filing system. 

• A project filing system is for all project artifacts, not just lessons learned. Many people talk about the importance of adding lessons learned to their project documentation. But the most valuable items in a project filing system are plans that can be edited and reused. Project plans that worked well are the ultimate in positive lessons learned! And other project artifacts, like documents, outputs, and deliverables can also be reused on future projects. Be sure to finalize and close out project artifacts before storing them in your filing system. When you do that, you’ll stock a warehouse of project templates to pick from that can save you time and money.

Lessons learned are important. To increase their effectiveness, tie them to specific project artifacts. For example, when you capture a lesson, reference the project task, change request, or risk to which it applies. If you ran into schedule delays because the database administrator was overcommitted, document the tasks that were affected. Or, add a reference to the risk about resource constraints and how those were managed. Lessons can also be about things that went well. Organizing all the lessons learned in your filing system can make future projects more successful.

• Categorize artifacts by project scope. Artifacts from previous projects are most relevant when they come from a project like the one you are managing now. But finding those projects in a filing system can be a challenge. Try categorizing projects by subject area or scope to make finding useful artifacts easier. (For example, projects that implement new financial procedures or add new functionality to the retail website.)  Classify your projects as you close them out. That way, you’ll expand your ability to reuse project management deliverables and increase your efficiency in the future! (Be sure to compare the scope on a new project to the scope of the past project and adjust for size and complexity, if necessary.)
• Focus on the triple constraints. Include a summary of your triple constraints in your project records. Files from past projects can help you estimate new ones. They provide benchmarks for costs and project duration. Need a quick answer for a senior leader who asks how much a project will cost? Want to know how long a project might take? Data that can help is in your filing system, as long as the scope, time, and cost data you captured are accurate and detailed.
• Identify the data you want to get out. Then capture and highlight what goes in. Organizations may have information that they’re interested in that projects can provide. For example, which top vendors perform best on projects? How long do decisions from regulatory bodies take? What items do regulators target when questioning results? Once you understand the questions and data your organization (and other projects) can benefit from, you can highlight that information in your archived project data.
• Appoint a curator or librarian to manage the project filing system. If everyone threw their data into the system, you could end up with duplicate terminology for the same item or the same lesson archived numerous times. To build a great project reference library, put someone in charge of curating and organizing the data from completed projects. The curator can also develop a guide to the library to help project managers and others track down the info they need.

There is no best way to design a filing system because it depends on your organization, projects, and other factors. That doesn’t prevent us from sharing tips with each other. If you have filing system tips and tricks that you’d like to share, post them in the comments section.

For more about saving and archiving project information, check out my Project Management Foundations (updated October 2022) course.