Many businesses are today facing a real problem of not being able to collate, categorise and retrieve the sheer number of documents that pass through the organisation over the course of a project. This is a particularly large challenge in the architecture and design sector, where projects can last for several years, and can involve a number of different stakeholders in various locations.
They require a comprehensive documentation of every iteration or stage of the process, which often must be kept for several years, and they need any and all files to be easily found, accessed and understood by the relevant personnel in order to deliver that project on time and within budget.
This requirement presents challenges that won’t be overcome with a sub-standard project mailbox, including:
- The storage of extremely large files over a long time period
- The creation and maintenance of an easily accessible repository
- Having project mailboxes that are not integrated with separate user mail and not accessible remotely
- Using independent calendars not linked to or viewable by other stakeholders
- Lack of context due to original mails not being filed with project documents
The result? An enormous amount of time being spent searching for the correct versions of the documents needed, and a breakdown in the communication and collaboration process.
An effective and efficient project mailbox in your information management system is therefore becoming an essential part of any project delivery process, but what are the IT must-haves you need to put in place in order to make this possible? We take a look…
It Must Enable Communication and Collaboration Across the Board
An effective project mailbox will allow all stakeholders to be kept up to date on every step within the project through automatic email notifications, and to be able to keep track of new submittals that are linked to the original mail and other related mails to provide context. Collaboration and communication is key, so it should have the facility to comment on or add to any updated iterations, and to track who got what, when, and how they got it.
It Must Be Able to Store Large Amounts of Data
A comprehensive repository for all documents, information and messages related to a project should be part of your project mailbox. This enables the organisation to store every version of every document or design, no matter how large, and allows stakeholders to easily find and access the files they need as easily as they would in a Google search.
It Must Be Accessible to All Users, Even Remotely
Given the nature of large design projects and the number of people involved, having all files and documents (including updates, iterations and archived files) stored in one place and accessible, even when stakeholders are on different servers, is crucial to the development of any project.
The way we work today means that more and more people work remotely, so being able to access and contribute to the project while out of the office is an important part of your IT set-up.
If the repository is cloud-based, a geographically diverse team should be able to read, reply to, comment on and communicate about each step of the project, as well as make documents available to other members of the project team, file updates accordingly, and search for and retrieve other files at the click of a button, even if they were not on the original distribution.
It Must Be Secure
Any business email system needs to be secure and protected from cyber attacks, malware and data leaks, so a robust internet security protocol and IT set-up needs to be a central part of any project mailbox and project information management system.
It Must Be Easy to Use
A creative project is based on documents, illustrations, mock-ups, prototypes, and designs, and your project mailbox should be able to keep and categorise versions and updates in a way that is clear to the team members involved. This also includes having version management in place for comments. Most of all, it needs to be simple enough that users embrace it and work more efficiently as a result. IT should work for you, not the other way around.
It Must Be Easy to Share with Clients
Keeping clients informed on every stage of a project builds trust, so being able to share the project status and provide easy to access documents and file sharing is important. However, there may also be times when you want to send on certain versions of the documents you have, without also allowing access to the process or iterations. This is why you need to have the right IT set-up in place to provide multi-level permissions, to ensure the right people see the right projects and the right versions of those projects.
Finding the right IT solutions to your project mailbox challenges is not always easy, but it is doable. The first thing you need is to be able to identify the requirements you need to maintain an efficient and effective project information management system, and an IT consulting expert can do this for you.
Then, you need to know how you can go about implementing those changes that will improve your communication, collaboration and document retrieval to save resources and deliver projects on time and within budget.
Find out how pebble.it can help you do just that by downloading our eBook on The Better Way To Manage Project Information:
