Interface Management IT and Documentation
How do you keep track of all the information and the questions raised between parties involved in interface management? We have talked about IT system tools before, but the terms below show just how fragmented the community is in the vocabulary of IT and documentation.
With multiple terms that mean Interface Issue (that is what we use, but the other terms work just as well) and others that are at least very similar to Interface Register, it is clear that we are an inventive group - and have re-invented the wheel on multiple occasions, often creating the registers and forms used. Nothing wrong with that, in itself.
A more important factor is the need to help people make the right choices for their projects.
It is much better to use a tried-and-tested system that is in use by multiple companies, and is probably already known by some of your contractors, than to make up a new system from scratch.
There are at least 10 vendors out there. Not many of them are particularly good, and none of them* currently works well with both kinds of project.
(* although that might change - in which case, let us know!)
It is also important to remember that there are two kinds of project - which need different structures and IT tools. This article - the third in the series of 5 - discusses this further.
At the 3rd Interface Management conference (in London, October 2016) delegates were invited to write specific interface terms on paper and put them on the wall. We ended up with 48 different terms. This article is the fifth and last in a series that discusses the themes that came out of this exercise.
This article was written by John Thropp and first published in February 2019.