A little while back, a distinguished Project Director in the oil and gas industry abruptly left his job after over a decade with his company. In an exit interview, it was discovered that the main source of his frustration was the lack of support he felt he was receiving from the company.
Specifically, he didn’t believe he was being given the proper tools to maintain control over his project and was continuously embarrassed by the lack of work accountability by his subordinates. It was later revealed this stemmed back to problems with the inferior electronic document management system (EDMS) he was using after the company made some significant budget cuts.
Here’s what they learned from his experience.
Frustrations Project Directors Face in Electronic Document Management Systems
Lack of Accountability
The electronic document management system the company was using didn’t provide any way of inspecting the work of project members.
Rather than being able to set milestones and deadlines, he had to trust the word of his team members that they were as far through a project as they said they were.
The software they used didn’t provide any sort of visual data to track progress. Lastly, there was no way to tell if feedback had been read or acted upon.
Lack of Reliability
All-too-often, documents passed on from one department to another didn’t include the latest edits and revisions. While work may have been updated, there wasn’t a uniform way of making sure all hands on a given document were looking at the same version.
One department would be working on a pre-edited document, while another was already collaborating with its third edition.
Lack of Exportability
Many projects had fallen critically far behind as the existing EDMS wasn’t compatible with the software used by some clients and subcontractors. If work was done on one program, it had to be retooled from scratch to another.
Lack of Flexibility
When the expectations of the project changed, the existing EDMS couldn’t be easily tweaked for new standards.
This became exceptionally complicated when there would come a need to allow subcontractors access to the work. Often times, there would be issues with document permissions, and some team members were left unable to complete their work.
Lack of Versatility
Finally, the company discovered that the software they were using was too limited.
The software’s entire workflow and process management structure wasn’t accounting for enough variables that their employees were encountering during their projects.
Find the Right EDMS System for a Project Director
A business running with a limited EDMS only serves to slow down work to a crawl, create confusion, and, sometimes, even drive away the best team members of an organization out of frustration. It was because of situations like this that Proarc was developed.
Proarc addresses all of these issues and more as it was specifically designed to assist engineering and construction professionals.
If any of these issues sound familiar, consider trusting your work to an EDMS that has helped the efficiency of employees and bottom lines of contractors in engineering, construction, oil and gas, and other crucial industries.
Consider trusting what many Project Directors already do – Proarc by Ascertra. Proarc boasts incredible versatility, flexibility, exportability, reliability, and increased communication between teams and third parties.
