A few years ago I set out to create an example of each of the documents listed in the 2000 edition of the PMBOK. I did not get as far as I had hoped, but the results from that project are here if you want to see them.

I did not finish that project. There were too many distractions and too many other priorities.

Since then I have rethought this whole effort.

• I have encounted numerous projects where the templates have been a burden. Either the templates were excessive for the scale of the project. Or the templates really did not fit. For example, I once worked on a process improvement proposal - not a project to change anything, just a project to create a proposal for what could be changed. On that project we were required to use the full set of RUP templates. Have you ever tried to write use cases for the process of creating a proposal? It became absurd. One use case described scheduling a meeting. One use case described posting the weekly schedule updates. It was a waste of time. After encountering the same perception elsewhere I am now opposed to having massive sets of templates. Instead, I think there are only a few templates required to do proper project management. My goal this time is to define that minimal set.
   
• I also found that template style is a very subjective matter of taste. Some companies require that all of the text within a template must be surrounded by a box. Other companies want everything plain and simple. Most companies want their graphic icon pasted somewhere on every document, even if that means that at 20k document is bloated to over 1mb. (And then 100 project managers send 100 documents a year to somewhere between ten and 100 people and pretty soon your mail server is occupying terrabytes of disk all because every document has to include multiple copies of some graphic.)
   
• Much of that wasted formatting is also a difficult task for most word processors. It is simple to place boxes within boxes within boxes in html. For example, look at the following illustration.

  Here is some text. And a few bullet items. Two should be enough. And a short numbered list. With a few items. Including items indented within. Two levels deep. With two items. Properly formatted. And arranged.

  
  Every browser that I have encountered in the past fifteen years can process that image successfully. And while that list looks pretty and it is color coded to match other sections on my web site, formatting text within boxes within boxes is surprisingly difficult for word processors.

  • Many of the "open source" word processor I tried could not read or update tables within tables.
  • MS Word has failed me repeatedly when changing the formatting on bullets within tables. The older versions used to crash and occassionally corrputed my document in the process.
  • Adobe InDesign can handle this task easily, but it brings other issues along with that capability. And once I upgraded to MS Vista I finally had to give up on all use of Adobe products. The negative side-effects outweighed the small advantage they once had over MS Word.
  • Quite honestly, I have given up on word processors doing this type of formatting and I have returned to formatting the text by hand using a text processor. Today my favorite document creation tool is ConTEXT - a simple text editor.
  
   
• And out of those issues I began to question whether or not the minimal gain in appearance was worth the aggrevation and time it took dozens or hundreds of project managers to put text into boxes. And that led me to start itemizing the requirements for document into simple lists. For example, my Quick Reference guides on Goverance and on Six Sigma include tables that define the section contents for standard documents I use in a project management office (PMO) and on six sigma projects.
  • Project Management Office Quick Reference
  • Six Sigma Quick Reference
  
   
• And it was through those years of struggle with this task that I have now adopted a new set of goals for this effort.
   
  1. I am in the process of converting all of the prior templates from Adobe back to HTML so that those documents can be more accessible to the users of my web site.
  2. I will now create a minimum number of new templates to illustrate the key documents that I find vital on all project.
  3. I will leave the task of creating one of every type of document to the people that have a greater need for standardization than do I.

Thank you for visiting my web site.
Robert Perrine
November 2007