Deliverable, Activity, and Gate Document Best Practices

Keep the following set of best practice recommendations in mind when defining deliverable, activities, and gate documents:

• Adding New Documents to a Model - If you add new documents to a model, the documents display in current, open projects in any stage to which they are added. Functions of added deliverables and activities are added to the Team page in the project if they did not exist for the team before.
• Use Templates for Ease and Consistency - To help maintain consistency in like documents across projects, and to help ensure that all the appropriate information is supplied, create templates and assign them to documents. Templates serve as a starting point for team members when starting work on a document.
• Know the Effects of Deleting Deliverables from Models - Deleted documents are removed from current, open projects unless the document has a saved version. However, if there is a deliverable with a saved version on a project, it will not be deleted. Any associated activities will likewise not be deleted. If an activity has a saved version, then neither the activity nor its parent deliverable will be deleted. Functions of deleted deliverables and activities are not removed from the Team page.
• If deliverables and activities are removed from a model and then added back again, even using the same names, you must re-create existing migration maps that contain those models. Accolade identifies objects within a model with unique IDs that change when new ones are created, causing migrations to fail unless you re-create the migration map.
• If a deliverable with a saved version in a current project must be deleted or modified, the Document Owner or Project Manager can delete the versions within the project before the model is changed. Then the changes to the model display in the project. The Process Designer may need to mark the deliverable in the model as deletable first.
• Use Combinations of Templates, Grids, and Workflows for Document Completion - For more complex documents, use a combination of a file template, quick grids for metric entry, and workflows to complete the document.