Document Management

The intent of the Document Management functionality is to keep all project related documents centralized and accessible to team members and project stakeholders. We distinguish between two types of documents:

Primary Documents are template based documents that provide a consistent way to document key aspects of the project plan – see below for examples. These documents are created/updated as the project proceeds through the phases of development.

Ad Hoc Documents are other documents created by the project team during the course of the project.

How it works

Our stage / phase gate system includes best practice-based process and document templates to support a variety of processes. The document templates have sections that are filled out by team members with instructions on what to address in each section. The majority of our templates are Microsoft Word® documents. For example, our New Product Development phase/stage-gate process template includes the following document templates:

Advance quality plan
Competitive assessment plan
Customer support plan
Design verification plan
Manufacturing plan
Market definition and forecast
Marketing launch plan
Product definition
Service and repair plan
Voice of the customer plan

These documents are managed within the PD-Trak stage/phase-gate software whether in the cloud or on your own company’s server and can be uploaded or downloaded by team members. Metadata is maintained for each document such as version and who and when the document was last modified.

The second category of documents managed by our project management system are other documents that the project manager or team needs to organize and manage based on the project requirements. These are organized into categories of documents with the categories defined by each project team. These are described as “ad-hoc documents” because they are defined as required for the project. Without even realizing it, this type of project document software has the potential to change the running and efficiency of a business for the better – look here for more information.

Within each category of documents, the individual document can be accessed and downloaded as needed. Metadata about the document is maintained such as author, revision, date and comments.