The larger a project is, the more difficult it becomes to share information between all the team members and stakeholders. This is especially true when more than one person works on large deliverables. If the project manager does not think about these document management processes ahead of time, the project team will end up with problems finding relevant information. This generally results in confusion and extra effort in re-doing work that was already completed.

The project creates many documents; for instance, the Project Charter, Issues Log, Logframe, schedule, etc. After a document is created, the team members need to know where it should be stored. Depending on the level of sophistication, the document might go into a network file folder, a file folder on a hard drive, a document management software package, or an intranet. After the document is created, the team must know who can have access to it. Most documents might be accessible to the entire team, but there may be restrictions when the project manager may only want them to be able to view the documents and not change them.

The project should come up with a common naming convention for the original document and any revisions. For example, any updates to the Project Charter, the document creator can save the original document and then designate the new document as version 2. These are all part of your document management procedures.

A good example is the project Status Reports. The project manager should determine the naming conventions of the Status Reports ahead of time. If every team member sends a Status Report to the project manager, it will not be long before the project manager has dozens or hundreds of Status Reports.

To help identify and sort documents, each report should name the document using a standard format such as –Name- -Status Report- -Date-. In this fashion the reports can be filtered by date or name and the project manager can easily identify which is the latest report 

Document management considerations are trivial for small projects. For large ones, these processes need to be planned ahead of time or else confusion, uncertainty, and extra work will occur when the project is in progress.