Lessons Learned: Managing Document Version

Most of the times I end up using Excel to create trackers needed for a project. If more than 1 person are inputting data into this tracker than document version control can become an annoying little problem. You may have updated the tracker this morning, but then, in the afternoon, your team mate updates the tracker you sent out yesterday - not today. This happens a lot, if there is not any simple process set up for managing document version effectively.

We adopted 3 simple rules to maintain one of the major trackers we used in our Big Project:

1. We had a tab within the tracker where the last person updating the spreadsheet put his name and noted the last time he updated the tracker (See Screen shot 1). So for example, according to this screenshot, last update was done by Kevin on 4/13/11 at 2:33 PM.
2. Once he updated the file, he would save the file with a new name by adding his initial at the end and the time. So for example in Screen shot 2, original file name is "Master Progress Tracker", date updated was 4/13/11, and the time was 2:33 PM. That's a good amount of information packed into the name.  
3. We had 3 guys updating the report on a daily basis; so Kevin would update this ONLY in the morning, and Eric would update this ONLY in the afternoon, and then if I had any update I would enter them at night - and that's the protocol we followed most of the time.

Screen shot 1:

Screen shot 2:

These rules may or may not apply to all cases, but if you have a tracker that gets updated multiple times, some sort of ground rules can help maintain the sanity.

A quick note... why not construct the tracker for online update? Well, it was not possible for our particular project; since this was a very fast paced project, and also, we wanted to make the tracker evolve as the project dynamics changed. How about on-line spreadsheet such as Google Docs? This can be a viable solution - however, our stakeholders preferred to receive project updates in an Excel based tracker.