The Art of Project Management

4.1. The value of writing things down

Daniel Boorstin, author of the great works The Creators and The Discoverers, once said that the written word was the greatest technology man ever invented. Without it, we'd be dependent on our notoriously unreliable memories(1) to do complex things like make dynamite (hmmm, how much nitroglycerin goes with how much charcoal?) or nuclear reactors (the uranium goes where?). Specific to the pursuit of project work, writing things down makes it possible to define engineering work or capture the overall objectives for entire teams only once, and reuse that knowledge many times. Documenting the details of decisions offloads the burden of precision and recollection from our minds down to paper, and all we need to do to recover them is look at what we wrote. That freedom of mind allows us to go at full speed at the task at hand, confident that we can return to what we wrote if needed (say, when we lose focus, have disagreements, or get confused). It follows that the more complex and involved any effort is, the more likely it is that writing down some of the details about it will improve the chances of success.

The larger a group of people working together is, the more complex and involved the work will be. A team of three people might be able to talk enough in the hallway to coordinate how their efforts will integrate and keep alive the final objectives clearly in mind. However, a team of 20, 100, or 1,000 people doesn't have that luxury. Instead, ...