Programme updates and narratives

Preserve with every update

• The native file, and a read-only snapshot in a format that cannot be edited later.
• The data date and the update period.
• Actual starts, actual finishes and remaining durations.
• Every logic, activity, calendar, constraint and coding change, with a reason.
• How out-of-sequence progress was treated.
• The longest path and the near-critical paths.
• A progress and critical-path narrative in words.
• Links to events, instructions and mitigation.
• Who prepared it, who checked it and who approved it.

Why the narrative is the valuable part

The numbers can be recalculated years later. The reasoning cannot. A narrative that says why the critical path moved, what the team was waiting for and what it did about it converts a schedule into evidence, and it takes twenty minutes a month.

Rejected programmes

If a programme is rejected, preserve the submission, the reasons and the resubmission. Rejection does not suspend planning, and the contract may attach consequences to acceptance or compliance that only make sense if the sequence of submissions is documented.

The test to apply

Could a competent analyst who has never seen the project reconstruct, from this month’s pack alone, what changed and why? If not, the pack is incomplete, and the gap will be argued about later by people who were not there.