As I look across the documents, I look for certain things:
- Trends – there are a couple of things I look for across projects and organizations, but other trends will come up during your document review.
- Does every external-facing document have 15 versions with 14 reviewers? A good sign you are dealing with a fearful and risk-averse culture.
- Are the members of the project team spinning their external-facing documents to be “all positive, all the time”?
- You may be dealing with a significant trust issue between the workers and their leadership and/or a highly competitive (and dysfunctional) workplace.
- I have learned over the years that information meant for general senior executive consumption will be:
- Biased towards the positive – making the project team look good
- Very high level and not the whole picture – details will need to come from elsewhere
- Designed for a discussion meeting and not stand-alone – ask if there are meeting minutes or emails resulting from that discussion
- What is the general reaction to “bad news”? Does the messenger get help (positive) or get shot (negative) or gets help THEN gets shot (passive-aggressive)?
- Is information being sent to a particular individual is being communicated one way, and that same information sent to another audience is being communicated another way.
- You may have just pinpointed your “messenger shooter” (if everything spins glowingly positive) or your “servant-leader” (if the majority of your sources to that individual provide “opportunities for assistance”)
- Is the individual behaving within the norm of the culture or is he/she an outlier? I.E – if the communication to one particular leader (across all authors) is more “positive” vs. what is sent to the other leaders and to each other, you may have a cultural outlier.
- Lessons learned that were not captured in the formal “Lessons Learned”
- Often, the lessons learned is done after the project. The project team is either basking in the glow (or grief) of a closed project OR it is a long time after the project completes and the project team has scrubbed the memory of the project from their heads as they move on to other things.
- This information may appear in either one document or across multiple documents (emails, meeting minutes, budget, project plan)
- Clarification of any contradictions I identified within individual sources
- Is there only ONE source reporting a piece of information and that information is contradicted by multiple other sources?
- The more sources that corroborate a piece of information – the more likely it is true
- Is there only ONE source reporting a piece of information and that information is contradicted by multiple other sources?
- Individual author tone across documents
- Gather everything a particular author has created for the project – any trends?
- Serious? A sense of humor?
- Detail oriented or high-level?
- Any “fixations?”
- Generally excited about change or regularly expressing concerns?
- How is the interaction with particular individuals? Positive and friendly? Tense? Sarcastic?
- Gather everything a particular author has created for the project – any trends?
During this entire process, I am collecting questions and developing conclusions.
The next step is to confirm any conclusions I have developed and attempt to get answers to any questions that may have come up as a result of my document analysis.
Resources
All Wikipedia articles should be used as a starting point for further exploration.
Wikipedia – Eyewitness Testimony
Wikipedia – Historical Method, Eyewitness Evidence
RJ Shafer – A Guide to Historical Method (affiliate link)
Previous posts
I Love Documents – Which documents to collect
The Benefits of Historical Methodology – Steps to analyze your documents
Step 1: Document Analysis – Analysis of individual source documents
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