Improved project management through improved document management

By drawing from field studies on three different types of business projects the paper outlines a improved document management approach. The three glob al cases, which comprise business process re-engineering (BPR), new product development (NPD) and one-of-a-kind manufacturing, enable to track a commo n set of document based operations which hold the vital information for the success of respective cases. This information reveals what is the true act ive organisation of the enterprise, what are the document usage profiles of the people and how knowledge-related creative processes are really perform ed by the organisation. In addition, the management is provided with new me ans to measure operational performance with better encompassing metrics. Th e approach and its partial implementation act as glue between various syste ms used within and between the collaborating companies. (C) 2001 Elsevier S cience B.V. AU rights reserved.