An important document in any project which must be maintained at every stage of the project

1. Why to maintain a logbook
of a project?
Presented by
Dr.Anagha Soman
Associate Professor, Electrical Department,
Marathwada Mitramandal’s College of Engineering

2. Is logbook necessary?
• for distributed teams, long term projects and products
• Logbook, diary, journal, bitacora… there many names for the same practice: write
down what you do.
• This practice has been used among sailors and scientists for centuries, for good
reasons
• Nowadays there are plenty of tools to keep track of what you do but nothing is as
powerful as a team, a project or a product logbook.

3. Team work & individual work

4. Individual or team work?
• “Programmers are exponentially faster when coding as
individuals; designers do their best work alone; artists rarely
collaborate and when they do, it rarely goes well.”
…..Jeff Stibel

5. Maintaining a Logbook is useful for
• Engagement
• Alignment
• Reporting
• Analysis / retrospective
• On-boarding

6. Engagement
• Knowing role of each team member
• Progress of each in the respective task
• Hurdles that are faced by the individual in performing assigned task
• In a contextualize manner, every one will be aware of task delegated
to each in a team.
• Cohesive environment to contribute towards the overall success of
the team

7. Alignment
• Status update will be readily available to each team member &
evaluator
• Helps avoiding divergencies of team members and aligning them all in
one direction
• All working for the same goal in one direction helps the project work
to be managed in a better way
• Each individual having different skill set can contribute towards the
goal in his/ her own way.

8. Reporting
• Logbook is a dragging force for report writing
• Any relevant information about the project can be retrieved easily at
any point of time from the logbook.
• The status report can be generated easily at any point of time during
any phase of the project

9. Analysis / retrospective
• The testing results if recorded neatly in logbook, analysis will be
simple to execute without unnecessary repetition of test procedures
• Do’s and Don’ts will be very clear from the steps recorded while
writing down the observations in logbook
• Loss of memory, a boon? If not, logbook helps us to record/ note
down each minute detail that is been observed throughout the
tenure of the project.

10. On-boarding
• For any reason, if any new member joins the team, its easier for the
newly joined to cope up with the process.
• The new bee will not only be well versed with his/ her own role but
will be well aware of the tasks delegated to each member in the
group

11. What to include in logbook?
Everything what you did, not about what you need or should do
• decisions and agreements,
• conclusions,
• achievements,
• pitfalls,
• mistakes,
• external events that have influenced your work,
• external references and data sources that were relevant
• Timing: Humans are notoriously bad at estimating how long a task will take
• Reviewing
• Transitioning ( if we want to continue after a break)

12. How to write?
• Be concise, easy and fast.
• Add links to the information sources (shorten the links)
• Provide context to those
• Add tags like dates, names and any other metadata that can help to contextualize
and structure the information later on.

13. Conclusion
• logbooks is a very useful practice
• increases engagement and alignment
• reduces the effort in reporting
• improves analysis and retrospectives