This is Part 1 in a series on Kanban’s delivery best practices.
Much of a project manager’s job requires a wrangling of tiny details. The more complexity there is in the design, the more details will come out over the entire course of the project. Every touch point adds to our understanding of how the client expects their functionality to work.
Some project managers keep a record of everything that occurs in every meeting. This serves a CYA purpose, but it can create too much documentation to take action on. A comment repository only tracks decisions and remarks about the functionality of what is being built. We use it for creating and updating our functional specs and for refining our QA test scripts.
At Kanban, the PM adds to the repository after every client presentation: wireframes, concepts, comps, functional specs, and sneak peeks. The client point-of-contact is then asked to revise and clarify what the PM captured. They add consolidated comments from other stakeholders. We always meet together with the POC and our design partners after receiving the consolidated comments. Everyone gets on the same page.
Prior to the next presentation, the PM reviews the new deliverables to confirm that every comment was addressed as agreed. Nothing gets lost.
Because the client is involved in clarifying the comments, and because they are tracked the same way in the same place across the entire project, the client knows and remembers the details of what they’re getting. Maintaining a single repository of comments is vital to creating a final deliverable that makes the client say, “This works exactly how I always thought it would.”