A Framework for Writing Better Documentation
I used to work somewhere that didn't take documentation as seriously as it should and I personally 'suffered' as a result because as a reviewer I spent a lot of time fixing poorly written docs, or explaining to others how they should fix them.I finally got management's attention when I stood up in one of our periodic group wide meetings and said "There is something that we do that is critical to our business but very inefficient because of the level of rework it triggers. Across a year we start this activity about once every two hours. What is it?"The answer was of course 'create a document'. I'd used our document issuing system to find out how many docs our group had created in a year. As a group that conducted research tasks and process-heavy delivery projects for external customers, we did in fact create a lot of documents. We already had a document guidance framework, but it wasn't until management realised the overhead created by not following it that the necessary training and education in doc production finally got traction.