C3 Document Control
Document control is a critical aspect of construction project
management. Even small projects involve ten or more design and
construction firms, producing between them 400-600 technical
documents (or documents about documents) for every million
pounds of construction value. The number of participants and
documents multiply rapidly as the project grows in size and
complexity. A typical fifty million pound commercial project
might easily involve forty consultants and contractors, and
generate up to 10,000 documents including both the primary
design documents and the secondary tracking documents -
'documents about documents'. Managing all of these documents is
a key concern for project managers.
Project teams are complex dynamic organisations that change
structure as the circumstances of the project dictate. The
documents they create and work with are also highly dynamic:
they are changed and revised continuously as the design of the
building evolves. It is a major problem to ensure that all team
members are quickly updated with the correct versions of all
documents. That's the purpose of a document control service,
usually a combination of a central document repository and
tracking service with associated document distribution services.
Basic quality assurance is fundamental to modern document
control. This entails keeping track of the project's people and
documents. Most importantly, it means standardising and tracking
the specific information about each primary technical document.
With thousands of documents in an electronic store and many
revisions of most of them, it's crucial that the information
used to identify and find individual documents is accurate and
complete. If this document specific information is managed
successfully, documents can be found and retrieved easily,
quickly and with complete assurance that they are the correct
versions.
A further key function of effective document control is
secure document approval. Users need to be confident that any
document has been approved for its purpose of issue by the right
team members. The only way this can be achieved with certainty
is for the team member in question to check the document and
show his approval by applying a mark or stamp to it. These marks
must appear on the document, so that a separate log or document
register isn't needed. If a separate log is used, it won't
always be checked - with potentially disastrous results.
The ability to track each document in detail throughout its
life-cycle is an important outcome of good document control. To
achieve this, the main transactions of the control process -
initial entry, QA and technical reviews, distribution to
designated recipients and viewing by those recipients - all need
to be logged carefully. The date/time and the identity of every
user who performs any of these operations must be recorded.
Furthermore, these records must be made transparently
available to all who may need them. If everybody knows
everything that's going on and everybody knows that everybody
knows, the system becomes very easy to administer, self-policing
in effect.
Document Control - A Service, not just a System
So our view is that document control is a service, not just a
system. No conceivable system, on its own, can cope with the
sort of fluid complexity that's involved in document control on
large projects. On a large project one or more good document
controllers will be needed to run the service. They have three
main roles:
- Keeping up with changes in the project organisation,
ensuring that the right people are known as document
originators, reviewers or recipients at all stages throughout
the project
- Ensuring that the documents can all be properly viewed and
printed by other users, by actually viewing and printing them
themselves, prior to registering them in the system
- Ensuring that all the information about each document that's
stored in the system (e.g. number, description, references,
revision numbers and rev notes) is in accordance with the firm /
project standards.
Some general purpose document management systems attempt to
automate some or all of the document control functions described
above. They usually prove to be too complex to configure and
use, or so rigid in operation that they distort completely the
"natural" operation of the project team processes.
The C3 TDM system, on the
other hand, has been designed from the outset with these
considerations in mind.
TDM reflects an
'intelligent' approach to document control on modern
construction projects. The system is remarkably easy to set up
and to use. Rather than imposing structures and processes
conceived by IT specialists or developed in other industries,
TDM
has been designed by construction industry people, specifically
to support best practice in construction document control; it
just fits comfortably around a well organised project team.