The way to effective system documentation
Like a garden, a company's system documentation requires care. Once it starts to grow, it becomes difficult to find your way around it. Systematics, relevance and conciseness should help to keep the scope of a system documentation at a useful level.
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 are growing over one's head and the entire system documentation is proliferating? With every error analysis, every audit and every review in the company, existing documents are usually supplemented or new documents are created. This means that the system documentation grows year by year. This is not a big deal. Electronic storage space is relatively cheap. Expensive filing cabinets and archives for paper documents are only needed on a small scale. Documents can be accessed easily from anywhere via the network. Managing documents has also become simple: create, release and post them on the intranet. The growth of the system documentation is digestible if the overview is not lost.
Hand on heart: Do you still see through? 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. Search engines in the file cabinet and in databases often don't help either. 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 the mass of information. A first strategy 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 bear this out. 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? You realize: knowledge is more than information. It arises from the networking of information. Clarity helps with this. And it is created by limiting the system.
For this reason, limits are important in digitized system documentation. In concrete terms, this means that system documentation should have limits in terms of its scope: a manual, for example, can be limited to the scope of fifty pages, process descriptions to a double page, and leaflets to one page. This should be done decidedly for system documentation. Limits inevitably lead to conciseness. A text inevitably becomes denser with the same content and less space. And not infrequently, more concise texts with tables or illustrations lead to better understanding.
Of course, system documentation must meet the changing needs of a company. It should therefore be adapted, i.e. it should be possible to enlarge it, but also to reduce it. 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. So you need gardeners who set garden fences and move them 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 the framework comprehensible for implementation by the employees on site.
Who builds the garden paths?
A second strategy starts with the process structures. The garden paths, the flower beds, seating areas, water points and tool sheds must be connected with each other. The more straightforward they 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 in addition to the manual. 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 to him 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 do well to design and question processes with the people affected.
Who goes to the compost?
A third optimization strategy starts with the individual documents. When documents live like plants, they adapt to changes in processes. In the process, new things are added to documents: for example, in the checklist for customer visits or an additional test step is integrated into a work instruction. The changes in a document annex should be briefly documented. This makes it easier to understand at a later date how the current version of a document came about. The subsequent integration of text may necessitate the revision of earlier text passages. This takes time. Existing passages may also be omitted. But sometimes passages are not deleted out of uncertainty, because something might be missing afterwards. And who 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. The purpose and scope of a document should be 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.
