One common difficulty for students to take their final-year project on software and/or information systems development is how to effectively execute a selected system development model so as to smoothly follow the processes throughout the project. The project supervisors must provide students with an appropriate guideline that is both understandable and executable by the students. Management centric and programming centric approaches have been widely adopted in guiding systems development. In this paper, a documentation centric approach is presented for guiding student projects on developing software and information systems. This approach is based on separate but yet linked phases. It aims to achieve the highest possible inheritance to and/or reusability for the next development phase. The case studies demonstrate that this approach is useful and effective in systems articulation and maximising reusability in progressive systems development. Failing to do so leads to abandonment of any further development due to insufficient supporting information inherited from the previous development.