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In the movie Memento, Leonard Shelby suffers from a total loss of short-term memory. He remembers his previous life up to the accident which caused that condition, but nothing beyond that - and since then he is unable to retain any memory of what happens to him.

Shelby has a project: track down and kill his wife's murderer. No brain that fragmented could cope with a definite, long-term project, you might think. How would one keep track of intermediate sub-goals, make plans for various contingencies, assess an overall situation ? But Shelby does cope; what he does is write notes to himself - on scraps of papers and on notebooks, on the back of Polaroid snapshots and beer mats. The most important notes he tattoos on his own body. With these aids, Shelby pulls off splendid project management in spite of an overwhelming handicap.

To Shelby, memory is overrated; documentation is crucial. "Memory's unreliable. No no no, really. Memory's not perfect; it's not even that good. [...] Look, memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts." The continuity of Shelby's existence depends on constant interpretation and re-interpretation as new facts come in.

A project team is a creature much like Leonard Shelby - one with no continuity, no unicity of consciousness, but still with a definite goal to strive for. A project team cannot remember. That is why it must do two things: first, constantly leave mementoes to itself in the form of project artifacts (documentation, code, diagrams, and so forth). But more importantly, it must draw all these together into a coherent whole at regular intervals by telling itself the story of the project.

According to philosopher Daniel Dennett's theory of consciousness, what he calls the multiple-drafts model, this is also true of an individual - in spite of the strong impression we have that our consciousness is a single integrated whole. That's actually an illusion - which we only maintain by constantly telling and retelling ourselves our own stories.