PCM concepts

The basic concept of PCM is as follows:

That is basically what PCM does. Based on your user security rights provided by an administrator, you have access to enter data in certain modules where this data can then be reported and flagged for use. This may seem to be a very simple statement and you might be saying "duhhhhh," but the big difference between this type of management and the management of old (prior to computers) is that we are now managing the data, and not the documents. Prior to computers, the only way to manage a project was to send official contract-related documents back and forth via snail-mail, and when you received a document you made multiple copies of it and placed those copies in various file folders in the file cabinet. For example, if you received a letter from the owner related to a question you had, you would take that letter and make several copies so you could place a copy of that letter into the "Owner Correspondence" file folder, the "Unresolved Issues" file folder, the various folders for each subcontractor involved, and so on. That way when you needed to find a letter that the Owner had written to you, all you had to do was pull the "Owner Correspondence" file and find the one letter you needed amongst the hundreds in the file. Hey, don't laugh; it was better than looking through all the thousands of documents you received over the course of the project.

Today, with the use of computers and databases we can now manage and create both. When we receive the document in any format, we capture the data, and we can then run reports against those data elements as well as "print" a form template that looks great as a document and "send" it to the necessary recipients. One of the many issues I have with the use of spreadsheets in managing project data is that all it does is manage project data; it is quite difficult to take the data elements and then populate a form template with consistency. More about the use of spreadsheets is in Chapter 4, The Almighty Spreadsheet.