How To Create Accurate, Appealing, Automated Documents In Seconds

Project Documentation Tips To Promote Accuracy, Brand Consistency, & Improved Information Management Efficiency

Project documentation standards among companies operating within the construction industry are not, unfortunately, “standard.” From legal disclaimers and document size and orientation requirements to project-specific information and formatting considerations; form creation is not as easy as we would like. Of course, after ensuring that all the required specifications and nuisances are considered, there’s still the issue of ensuring that your forms, contracts, statements, and other project documentation adheres to corporate branding standards.

Standardization of essential business functions is essential for enhanced efficiency, greater accuracy, and improved consistency – not to mention crucial for best-in-class client service. Therefore, it’s important to take a “go slow to go fast” approach. Meaning, make time to identify, plan out, and collect the tools necessary before you even begin the project. Doing so will empower your team to deploy and execute your strategy quickly, accurately, and consistently (in line with all standards and specifications), in the field.

Read on to learn a few document generation tips that will help your construction reports stand out. Then, keep reading to learn how project teams can automate the creation, security, and completion of essential project documentation.

Beautiful Project Docs In Seconds

Documents, their creation and control, are a vital part of every project. During the pre-positioning and RFQ stage, you will need to create, store, secure, and distribute any number of documents, including NDAs, contracts, proposals, and other assets related to winning the bid. Then, once the project is won, you will need to create and transmit documents on a schedule as part of your contract. Needless to say, doing this by hand, without automation or templatization, is (frankly) a shear waste of valuable time and a drain on company resources.

The right document generation software will allow you to apply general customization out of the box. These customizations might include:

• • Logos & Other Images
  • Font Types & Colors
  • Layout & Formatting
  • Headers & Footers

More powerful document generation tools, however, will allow you to add project-specific information, including:

• • Appropriate legal disclaimers
  • Dates
  • Project Number
  • Job Site Information
  • Roles & Names
  • Project Status Information
  • Really, any projct-specific information you can think of can be added depending on the needs of your project and documentation type.

Superior document generation tools, on the other hand, will allow you to generate customized documents instantly or on a schedule and then give you the ability to seamlessly move your generated documents through an appropriate workflow, such as:

• • Content Registration
  • Content For Review
  • Content Approval
  • RFI Management
  • Change Order Management
  • Submittal Management
  • And any combination of those listed above through the ability to connect workflows to move work forward faster and efficiently.

Superior Project Document Generation: With Screenshots

The Right Information, Right From The Start

From the start, when you build your project, ProjectReady brings in critical information from your connected data systems. Armed with this information, you gain the ability to effortlessly apply accurate metadata to the project. This metadata helps set the stage for extensive reporting on the project while helping you and your team to quickly produce accurate documents, every time.

Are Your Project Documents Secure?

Whether instantly or on a schedule, after you’ve generated your report, meeting minutes, site notes, transmittal, submittal, RFI, change order, or any other relevant report, you need to store your document in a location that allows others on your team to collaborate on it – securely. Otherwise, you’re just introducing risk to the confidentiality and integrity of the project.

SharePoint, provisioned and locked down by ProjectReady, gives you a secure location to store documents. Thanks to a unique approach to roles-based security and governance, once documents are generated, they are instantly saved to the appropriate, security-trimmed library. Only the right people have access to certain documents – as determined by each individual’s role on the project.

For example, not everybody on the team will (or should) have access to legal documents. To ensure that only the right people have access, all legal documents are automatically saved to a hyper-secure legal library within the project’s SharePoint site. If you have another minute, check out this article to learn why SharePoint is actually a great project information management tool.

Add Project Document Creation To Your Workflow

Once you’ve won a project and it’s been awarded, contractually mandated documents can be scheduled to be created. Then, via DC Next, ProjectReady’s document control suite, can be reviewed, approved, and transmitted on a schedule.

Let’s say, for example, you are responsible for completing a monthly inspection of a job site. Because this task occurs on a schedule, the timeline can be built at the beginning of the project. Every month, you will have a task due pertaining to the monthly inspection. To complete this task, all you would have to do is open the task and click the plus sign to generate the document. Because ProjectReady built out the document control schedule, the correct document is already associated with the task. This means, once generated, you can move the monthly inspection document through the content approval workflow and proceed with the actual inspection. Quick. Easy. Painless.

What’s also great about adding the creation of documents to your project workflow is that your team is able to collaborate and conduct meetings in the context of the task, document, and project – all within the same, user-friendly interface. Then, after meetings have taken place, time can be tracked against the task and meeting minutes or generic notes can be created/added.

Ready To Learn More?

ProjectReady makes it easy to connect your platforms, generate documents, and automate (and connect) workflows while helping you keep your information organized, secure, and usable. If you have questions regarding ProjectReady’s project document creation tools or would like to learn more about our approach to modern and collaborative project information management, fill out the form here or send us an email at [email protected].