- Contemporaneous record keeping is better than reconstructive record
keeping.
- Have a contemporaneous tidy-up attitude.
- Make the record keeping system as simple as possible. If despite all
efforts it is still complex, make sure it is of irreducible complexity.
(Just because its complex doesn't make it OK to make it more complex.)
- Constantly segregate documents into two types: "Keep Until" and "Can
Loose".
- Remind self that records are meant for providing some kind of information
to a future someone, and you may never know who that someone is.
----Original Message Follows----
From: Christopher Wright <chrisw@skypoint.com>
Reply-To: <seaint@seaint.org>
To: <seaint@seaint.org>
Subject: Re: Document Control Systems - Suggestions Requested
Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2007 11:56:39 -0500
On Jul 2, 2007, at 8:39 AM, John Whitty wrote:
>As our company continues to grow we are increasingly in need of a good,
>solid engineering document control system.
I'd be interested in hearing about this myself, if only to see one case of
a good system. Given what I've seen, and a couple of my own efforts I'd
say it's damn near impossible without someone keeping up with it full-time.
Where you make compliance into everyone's responsibility, it automatically
becomes no one's responsibility. Moreover if it adds to someone's
administrative burden without showing an almost immediate benefit, it gets
neglected and ignored.
Most of the 'systems' I've run into are far too complicated and so
inflexible that they they don't adapt very well to changes in philosophy
and emphasis. They're also hard enough to explain to a new hire that
mistakes occur and stuff gets misplaced.
The three biggest mistakes engineers make is to save everything, create
overly complicated procedures and identification systems and fail to clean
up and organize files when a job is over. So when you do a system, you need
to decide why you have a control system, what exactly you want to control
and why.
Emphasize process before you start writing up procedures. If you start
putting together a procedure based on what would have prevented the most
recent misfiled correspondence crisis, you're likely to miss the next
crisis which will occur for entirely different reasons. If it takes a 5
page procedure and 2 hours of orientation to explain your drawing number
system you're begging for problems. Don't mistake flexibility for
ambiguity.
I've found that it makes a lot more sense to number things sequentially and
do the categorizations in software as needed. It's almost impossible to
misfile sequentially numbered file folders or drawings because there's
nothing to remember and mistakes are obvious. Classification schemes should
be carefully reviewed for sources of ambiguity--you don't want to have one
thing fit two categories. And give some serious thought to how the system
will be used in another 10 or 15 years. Decide what needs to be in a job
file when the job is finished--what needs to be saved and why.
Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at
chrisw@skypoint.com | this distance" (last words of Gen.
.......................................| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania 1864)
http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw/
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