Who are the gardeners in your company?

Imagine that documents behaved like plants. A system documentation then corresponds to a garden in which every plant has its place: in the bed, on the seat, in the border. The garden also contains retaining walls, paths and watering holes. They give it a structure, make it walkable, bring life to bloom. But the plants grow - the trees in the height, the bushes in the width -, proliferate and overflow. It becomes increasingly tedious to get through the garden. The fruit rots on the trees. Where is the gardener?

No care without a gardener

The image of the overgrown garden is no coincidence. Who doesn't know the feeling that one's own documents, the entire system documentation is sprawling? With every error analysis, every audit and every review in the company, existing documents are usually supplemented or new documents are created. Thus, the system documentation grows year after year. This is not a big deal. Electronic storage is relatively cheap. Expensive filing cabinets and archives for paper documents are only needed on a small scale. Access to documents is easy via the network and from anywhere. Managing documents has also become simple: create, share and post on the intranet. The growth of system documentation is digestible if the overview of all these documents is not lost.

But hand on heart: Is that the case? In the growing tangle of information, it is becoming increasingly difficult to have the right knowledge available in the right place at the right time. Even search engines in the file storage and in databases do not always help. Too much is too much. Without care, without a gardener, it doesn't work.

Who sets the garden fence?

There are various strategies for dealing with this mass of information. A first one starts with the system documentation as a whole. Because storage space is almost limitless, because documents are accessible and thus quickly available regardless of the workstation, and because search engines ultimately facilitate the retrieval of documents and thus make the document chaos seemingly manageable, little attention is often paid to the scope of the entire system documentation. Only: an overgrown garden without borders becomes a labyrinth.

But is that true? The advantage of the digital world is that we are far less bound by borders than in the physical world. The success of knowledge databases on the Internet seems to prove this. But: It is easily overlooked that the relevance of a contribution is not apparent from the contribution itself. Ask yourself the following questions: Is this important to me? Or am I going from the hundredth to the thousandth? Can I neglect it? You will find out: Knowledge is more than information. It arises from the networking of information. Clarity helps in this process. And this is also created by limiting the system.

For this reason, limits are also advantageous in digitized system documentation. This means that system documentation should have limits in its scope: a manual, for example, can be limited to the extent of fifty pages, process descriptions to a double page, leaflets to one page. This does not have to be done stubbornly, but decidedly. Limits inevitably lead to conciseness. A text will inevitably become denser with the same content and less space. And not infrequently, more concise texts, but also tables or illustrations, lead to better understanding.

Of course, system documentation must meet the changing needs of a company. It should therefore be able to be adapted, i.e. enlarged, but also reduced. The aim is to achieve an optimum between too little and too much information. However, this optimum can only be achieved if someone in the company stands up for it. It needs gardeners who put up garden fences (and move them again if necessary). Ideally, a team from quality management and IT - ideally supported by the management - analyzes the needs and defines the framework. A comprehensible system and concise documentation principles help to make this framework comprehensible for implementation by the employees on site.

Who builds the garden paths?

A second strategy starts with the process structures. These are the garden paths that connect beds, seating areas, water points and tool sheds. The more straightforward these are, the faster the garden work can be completed. Straightforward processes and workflows guide employees through their work and prevent the need to write detailed instructions to explain them. It is important to remember that systems are always close to the communication structure of their inventors. Those who are allowed to define a structure will easily find their way around it. It always corresponds to his own logic. Woe betide anyone who thinks otherwise. Processes should therefore always be thought of in terms of the people who work in them, with all their differences and idiosyncrasies. Process designers would do well to design and question the processes with those affected.

Who goes to the compost?

A third optimization strategy starts with the individual documents. If documents live like plants, they adapt to changes in processes. The fact that new things are added to documents in the process does not need to be emphasized. New points are added to the checklist for customer visits. An additional inspection step is integrated into a work instruction. Criteria are defined for the selection of suppliers to be evaluated. It must be emphasized more that the changes are briefly documented in a document appendix. This makes it easier to understand at a later date how the current version of a document came about. This has advantages - as we shall see. What really needs to be emphasized, however, is that existing text can also be dropped. The subsequent integration of text can make it necessary to revise earlier text passages. This takes time and is often better left undone. Sometimes, however, passages are not deleted out of uncertainty because something might be missing afterwards. And who always knows why something is in a document? With the help of the change appendix, this would be much easier to understand, for example if the document was created several years ago. It also helps if the purpose and scope of a document are briefly described at the beginning. This makes it possible to check again and again what an existing document, for example a leaflet, regulates (and what it does not).

It is therefore up to the process owners to keep their documents up to date and to avoid unnecessary bloating. They are their own gardeners, pruning their plants and carrying the resulting green waste to the compost. Meta-information such as purpose, scope, and change annex help them do this. They should be standard and maintained in important documents such as manuals, instructions of any kind or leaflets.

Smart gardeners regularly cut

When the garden is already overgrown, a bare cut is often unavoidable. Smart gardeners, however, work in the garden every day, but only briefly. With the right cuts at the right time, the maintenance effort can be reduced to a necessary minimum. What does this mean for your company? Give the system documentation and document management of your company the necessary weight. This will avoid a lot of idle time and follow-up costs.