Stop doing admin. Start running the project.

12 May 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:39

In this brief segment of William Doyle MRICS’s YouTube video, two speakers contrast true project management—shaping future outcomes—with the routine task of merely administering records. Speaker A criticises the habit of keeping records solely for compliance, calling it miserable, and advocates for capturing data efficiently and feeding it back into the project management process to improve outcomes. Speaker B explains why record‑keeping has traditionally been emphasized: to provide a robust audit trail that demonstrates compliance with health and safety, quality assurance, and engineering assurance requirements, thereby proving that the work was built safely, to specification, and to the required quality.

Chapters

Project management is about influencing what hasn't yet happened. Everything else is just administration. So, you know, are we, are we administering the records for the sake of doing records in case we have a problem? How miserable is that? You know, how about we, how about we capture them all in a really good way and then actually feed that back into our project management processes for the better?
Going back to the very start of the conversation about why it's always been done, I think for a lot of those reasons it's been done for either health and safety, for quality assurance, for engineering assurance. It's been very important to have an audit, a robust audit trail. Yeah. That shows we built this thing safely, we built it to the required quality and specification, and you've got that.