EDRM project planning
The key document for any project including an EDRM project is the project plan. This will be a living document that will not be finished until the project is completed. It will be constantly amended to reflect the feedback from each stage of the project.
The ten stages in this EDRM toolkit are designed to form the basis for an EDRM project plan.
Stage one involves defining what you mean by an EDRM system and where it fits in your wider information infrastructure. At the end of that stage you will have a clearer idea of the type of functions you require - what is in scope and what is out of scope and hence you will be able to better plan stage two. You may also need to adapt the overall project plan.
Stage two involves defining the project at a high level and in particular the scope of the project. For some education organisations - who have no experience of records management and have not set up a records management project ahead of the EDRM project - this will involve extending the overall project plan considerably to include additional records management tasks at stages three, four, five and six. For other education organisations - who have completed a full records management programme already and planned EDRM procurement as one project within that programme - this will involve truncating the overall project plan and removing those tasks in stage three and stage four which have already been conducted.
The work done at stage three will again certainly lead to changes in the project plan for stages four to ten. In some cases more tasks will have to be added and in others some tasks can be removed.
The JISC infoNet preferred approach to planning is called the Sliding Planning Window or "rolling-wave" planning. It is well suited to an EDRM project plan as it is based on the premise that you should only plan in detail as far ahead as is sensible at the time.
The general principle that should be followed with an EDRM project plan is that the completion of each stage of the plan should be associated with the achievement of one or more milestones in the plan and each stage and ideally each step in each stage should have a clearly defined deliverable.
You need software tools to assist with project planning and management. These are covered in the JISC infoKit. No special tools are needed for an EDRM project.
You need to be able to estimate the time and resources needed to complete all the tasks. The toolkit provides you with a "Resources required to complete the stage" sub section for each stage.
The other planning techniques covered by the infoKit are all useful in an EDRM project. Managing an EDRM project is in that sense just like managing any other IT project.
