Project Management consists of managing your project plan, achieving your project objectives, and delivering the intended project results to your clients, customers and management.  As a freelance project manager, doing this effectively requires a disciplined project management approach using key project management process, methods, tools, and documents to guide your progress.

In this post I’m going to represent the essential documents that are required for better project management in freelancing.

Project Charter

You need to create a one page document that is called the project charter. This document will make sure that you and your client understand the general goals of the project. It contains main goals of the project and process detail of the project.

Client Requirements

This document provides the complete detail of requirements of the clients, project assumptions.

Project Management Plan

Proper planning is an essential part of any activity. This document includes a list of the work that needs to be done who will do it, the cost and time to do this work, and finally a simple review of what will go wrong, known as a risk assessment. This is a complete over view of the project that will be held in future.

Quality Assurance Planning

This document provides the quality standards for your project deliverables will have to align to. These may typically include product testing approach and tools, quality policies, quality checklists, deviations definitions, quality metrics, product defect severity grades, acceptance criteria, cost of poor quality, etc.

 Progress Report

This document has great importance in project management process that provides a monthly or weekly step by step detail of the project. It delivers to clients on regularly basis for informing them about the project. Your major challenge is just collecting this information so that you can create your regular progress report.

Final Project Report

This report is compiled at the completion of the project. It contains final outcome of the whole process in detail. It explains the real cost of the project and process of the project.