Throughout the course of the project, the Project Manager should have maintained a project archive. As the project progressed, the purpose of the archive was to create a central point of reference for all project materials to be used by anyone involved in the project. Once the project comes to an official close, the archive provides an audit trail documenting the history and the evolution of the project.
During Project Closure, the Project Manager should examine whether the correspondence exchanged, the project management documentation (like project plan, risk plan, quality plan, acceptance plan, Risk Log, Acceptance forms, Project status reports, Project Evaluation Report etc), the project related material, the deliverables (e.g. in case of studies, training material, draft of laws, procedures manual etc), change request forms, approvals and decisions taken have been indexed. If any of the above mentioned material is missing, the Project Manager should try to find and file it. The archive must be in both: electronic and hard copy forms.
Project Archive apart from permitting future audit of the project’s actions and performance, it may be useful to future project managers and of course to those who later may carry out post project review in order to assess achievement of the benefits claimed in the Business Case.
The following list presents the typical contents of the project archive:
Checklist 7-6: Material concerning the project that must be included in the project’s archive
Project Material |
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Business Case |
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Cost Benefit Analysis (if applicable) |
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Feasibility Study (if applicable) |
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Project Fiche |
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Project Fiche for EU funding (if applicable) |
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Approval for EU funding (if applicable) |
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Tender Announcement (if applicable) |
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Tender Documents (if applicable) |
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Contract (if applicable) |
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Activities Schedules (baseline and updates) |
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Resource Plan (baseline and updates) |
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Cost Plan (baseline and updates) |
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Quality Plan |
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Risk Plan |
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Risk Log |
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Acceptance Plan |
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Communication Plan |
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Inception Report (if applicable) |
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Project Progress Reports |
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Project Status Report |
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Expense Forms (if applicable) |
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Timesheets (if applicable) |
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Invoices and payments |
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Quality Review Reports |
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Acceptance Forms |
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Change request forms |
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Letter of approval or rejection of change |
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Minutes of meetings |
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Correspondence, including decisions, memos, letters etc |
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Deliverables (if applicable) |
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Project Evaluation Report |
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