The Promise of Project Files: A Case Study.

• Author: SANDERS, ROBERT L.

Information managers are familiar with project files as a subcategory of a type of office records usually called case files. While all case files are associated with specific persons, things, instances, or activities, project files document activities with discrete objectives, starting dates, and completion dates.(1) They are part of the relatively new, but widely adopted, discipline of project management.

Although engineers first popularized project management, information managers have enthusiastically adapted its principles for their own undertakings. One of the best descriptions of this adaptation is Alice Gannon's article "Project Management: An Approach to Accomplishing Things." (Records Management Quarterly, July 1994) Project management is a discipline that information managers can apply to their own projects, and it is a discipline in which information management must play a crucial role, no matter what type of project is involved.

Perspective: The Los Angeles Metro Rail Project

In 1980 the people of Los Angeles realized that extending the city's maze of freeways could not prevent total gridlock by the year 2000, so they voted a half-cent sales tax to finance a rail transit system and then sent politicians to Washington to lobby for additional federal dollars. There followed countless designs, environmental impact studies, public hearings, property condemnations, engineering designs, construction contracts, and -- of course -- lawsuits. By the end of the 1980s, the L.A. Metro Rail project had become the largest public works project in the United States.

The project began to falter after a large section of Hollywood began slowly sinking into the ground above the tunnel; the project's credibility with the media, politicians, and the public crumbled. By early 1998, the wells of local, state, and federal funds had run dry. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted to suspend the project. Faced with the challenge of mothballing all project-related documents, L.A. Metro Rail discovered that it had never really mastered the prerequisite job of establishing an effective project file.

The following are some "Monday morning quarterback" reflections on the importance of a secure, accessible project file, the obstacles to achieving it, and how to overcome them.

The Promise of the Project File

The project file promises several important benefits regardless of the project's nature. First, because a project creates or changes something, rather than just operating or maintaining it, the likelihood is much greater that disruptions and discontinuities will occur. Such occurrences always tend to upset someone. Consequently, most projects (and all of those in the state of California) incur lawsuits that require well-organized, accessible, and comprehensive project records. For example, on the L.A. Metro Rail Project, there were many document discovery demands specifying "all records pertaining to" the project in question. Others required a set of records that had never before been considered an identifiable group. The greatest...