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This is a great question and one that will often provide different answers depending on who you ask. In everyday terms, we create documents with things like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and CAD applications, and the like. Documents are the things we encounter every single day, so much so it can be tricky to define what they actually are.

In the context of a project, we can be a little bit more specific. You might say that documents describe requirements. They tell us what needs to be done and often how to do it. Drawings and specifications are great examples of this.

Documents explain processes and procedures. Contracts, reports, and schedules are documents too. Manuals, certificates, warranties, the list goes on.

Collectively, they may be referred to as documentation or document sets. One thing is for certain. Without documents, it will be next to impossible to get anything built. All projects generate documentation and documents, and they're crucial to its success.

Documents often go through a series of revisions or versions, and they often need to be reviewed by various team members before they can be used. We'll talk about these things in a little bit more detail in other lessons. But it's often what's meant by the term control document? It typically means documents that are stored in a system or on a platform like Aconex and that are used by others.

When you initially create a document or file, you'll need to get it to a certain state before others can use it. And that will often involve going through multiple drafts and amendments. When it's ready for use, you add it to the system or platform and make it available for others. And the updates will follow a similar process of amending and review before reissuing a new version. And that's essentially what control documents are.

Let's finish with a question we often get asked. What document should we put on Aconex? The lazy answer would be every document. But that's not very useful, is it?

The better answer would be any document that is important to the project and project team. If a document is needed in order for someone to do something to get the project finished, then it should be on Aconex.