What Is Your Company's Source of Truth for Projects?

A few years ago, the project management team at my company worked hard to develop standardized project documents. We outlined our best project charter, project plan, and project closure templates, and got input from key stakeholders and users at our company. We were proud of them, and we rolled them out to live projects. For the next several months, I personally drafted each of these documents for my projects. I got the appropriate signoffs and shared them out with the teams.

Eventually I realized the documents weren’t taking off. Aside from signature requests, nobody ever looked at them. All the key project information was there, but nobody referenced it, so it had no impact on my projects. After a few months I stopped creating them.

What went wrong?

Understanding sources of truth

“Source of truth” wasn’t a term I’d encountered in a work setting until I managed projects—and in particular, until I researched project management tools. It’s a common selling point for these tools: “have a single source of truth for your projects!”

So what does it mean? The “source of truth” for projects at your company is simply “the source or sources people rely on for accurate, up-to-date project information.”

It is great, as project management tools advertise, to have one source of truth for your projects that is intentionally chosen and meets everyone’s needs. But whether your company has this or ever moves toward it, and whether you help get it there, understanding what source of truth people use today is critical to achieving your project goals today. In the rest of this post I’ll describe some possible sources of truth for projects to help you identify and leverage the ones your coworkers use.

Project Management Software

An ideal source of truth for many companies, project management software—sometimes called a project management information system (PMIS) or project portfolio management tool (PPM)—is intentionally designed to hold most or all the information you might need to know and track for projects. Common examples are Asana, Trello, Monday.com, Jira, Microsoft Project, ClickUp, and Basecamp. Spreadsheet software (Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, Google Sheets) is also commonly used as a PMIS.

Documents

A project charter, project plan, statement of work, or scope of work are common terms for a document that holds critical information about a project. There can be many supplemental documents as well: a schedule, a change log, a risk register, a stakeholder register, etc. I’ve also seen—and used—completely custom document types and formats that emerge to track project data specific to a given situation or project type. Any of these documents might exist in paper or digital form.

Email

We’ve all watched discussions and decisions play out, however clumsily, in long group email threads. Sometimes an email thread or a set of email threads is the project information that your team relies on. This might be as intended, or it might be the information-sharing method team members turn to if they find other tools or sources of project information confusing or cumbersome.

Instant Messaging Software

My company uses instant messaging software in a more limited, quick-question way, but some software programs with an instant messaging feature also have many other features that allow you to organize project information. I’ve heard of teams using Slack or Microsoft Teams as the main tool for keeping their projects on track.

People

All of the sources of truth listed previously rely largely on written project information: you have to look up something that’s already been written down. My big discovery in the launch failure of project documents at my company is that my company at the time had something akin to an ‘oral culture’—people would just ask the most knowledgeable person when they wanted a project update. This would happen in person, or by email, or by instant message, but the key is they tended to ask a person anew rather than looking up something that already existed in writing.

If people are the trusted source of truth at your company, the person who wants the information doesn’t have to do the work of looking something up, but the person being asked might have to repeat themselves many times. People as a source of truth also makes it harder for those people who hold project information to truly disconnect when they’re off work.

Identifying and leveraging sources of truth

No source or sources of truth are right or wrong. Some will be a better or worse fit for your company or its projects. But the point here is that it’s important to recognize what source or sources people rely on, and to use those same sources to manage your projects. If you try to communicate project information in other ways, you are:

1. At least partially wasting your effort, because not everyone will pay attention.
2. Probably creating a competing source of truth, and the information from the two sources will need to be reconciled at some point. Misunderstandings will need to be cleared up.

Start where your team is. Use the sources of truth they use. Speak their project-information-sharing language. This will lower their barrier to project participation. It will also build your team’s trust in you because they will feel understood. The projects you are currently working on will move farther, faster, and you won’t waste time creating project data that is ignored.

Improving sources of truth

This is not to say you should never experiment with other sources of truth, tailor sources to the needs of a project, or try to move your company as a whole toward using better-fit sources of truth for projects.

But when you do, it’s important to recognize when you’re asking people to rely on a source of truth they’re not used to. Take extra steps to help them use the new source successfully, including:

• Explain to all team members and stakeholders why this new hub of project information is the best fit for the situation.
• Be prepared to help team members get comfortable with the new approach (ie, help them understand new software).
• Keep an eye out for people returning to old sources (ie, sharing updates by email) and be prepared to kindly redirect them to the new source.

When we weren’t successful at introducing project documents as a new source of truth at my company, I could have made the choice to work harder and help people make the transition. But it really came down to value: was there enough value to my company, its goals, and its people to make that transition at that time? I didn’t feel there was. We’ve since been much more successful at helping people transition to relying on a PMIS for project information, and away from always asking a person as they had before. This has been a better fit for us and added more value.

Good luck learning to speak your team’s language. It will build the trust you need to allow you to lead them toward better sources of truth in the future.