➞ Documentation is Essential to Quality and Process Control
There’s more than one way to get things done, and you want to give your team the flexibility to approach their work in a way that suits them best. But simultaneously, you want to ensure consistent results – especially regarding things you’re regularly producing. There must be some cohesion, so you don’t look sloppy or uninformed.
Documentation encourages knowledge sharing, which empowers your team to understand how processes work and what finished projects typically look like. With those resources in hand, your team members don’t need to be mind readers to maintain consistency of repeated projects like that monthly report or that quarterly presentation. They still have wiggle room to get creative while confirming that they’re checking all the must-have boxes.
➞ Documentation Cuts Down Duplicative Work
How often have you started a new project only to find out it had been done before? Companies that use Documentation to catalog past projects, collect research, and share decisions benefit by reducing re-work that wastes precious time you could be using elsewhere.
Why reinvent the wheel when you can build on the work that’s already happened?
With Documentation in place, you can refer to past work and learn from it instead of doing it all over again with the same results.
➞ It Makes Hiring and Onboarding So Much Easier
It’s tough to think about anybody leaving, but the reality of business is that your team won’t stay the same forever. People will hit the road, and you’ll bring some new people into the fold.
When you’re welcoming new team members, that onboarding period can be daunting, both for your existing team and that new employee. And unfortunately, Gallup found that only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job onboarding new workers.
You want to educate and empower team members to do their best work rather than making them feel like they’re thrown to the wolves.
If you prioritize Documentation, they’ll have all sorts of helpful guides, directions, and notes that they can refer to as they get up to speed in their new roles. Plus, they can use those resources to answer their questions and start to figure things out independently, rather than feeling like they need to ping someone on your team with every single question or sticking point.
➞ A Single Source of Truth Makes Everyone Smarter
At work, we treat our knowledge as currency. If we’re the person with all of the answers, it provides us a sense of security, as if we’re the most irreplaceable person on our team.
We assume that sharing our expertise will make us less valuable.
That’s why it’s little surprise that one survey found that 60% of employees have had difficulty getting their colleagues to share information vital to their work.
Documentation increases the collective knowledge of everyone that you work with. When it becomes the norm for your team to share information, you’ll benefit from increased transparency and a more collaborative and strategic culture. You’ll make more intelligent decisions because essential details won’t be locked away on just one person’s hard drive - or worse yet - their head.
➞ Documentation Should Be Your Best Friend
From covering an unexpected departure or absence of an employee to tackling an unfamiliar project, you can overcome plenty of daunting hurdles together.
While it might sound stiff and formal, prioritizing documentation means you and your team will develop a stockpile of information you’ll lean on.
Share the above advantages with your team members, find a way to incentivize their participation in documenting what they can (pizza party, anyone?), and rest easy knowing that your team’s knowledge will no longer live just in their brains.
➞ Tips from Bello
Documentation is essential, mainly when new professionals are beginning and must understand how the system, features, and business rules work. Another significant point is to document bugs so that every time a tech guy faces them, they will know that this is a reported issue (not a surprise) that must be fixed.
➞ Business Rules
I often experienced developers coding a feature or a product without knowing business rules. It can only happen if all developers understand what they are developing and how things should work. It's your responsibility as a product manager to map all those rules and create a user story that your team can understand. Also, always schedule a meeting with your tech team to explain the business rules.
Referral Links:
SHRM | Only 12 Percent of Employees Felt Their Company Did a Great Job with Onboarding - https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/toolkits/pages/understanding-employee-onboarding.aspx#:~:text=A%20recent%20Gallup%20study%20showed,excel%20in%20their%20new%20role.
Atlassian | Text Revised & Rewritten - https://www.atlassian.com/work-management/knowledge-sharing/documentation/importance-of-documentation#:~:text=Documentation%20is%20essential%20to%20quality%20and%20process%20control&text=There%20needs%20to%20be%20some,finished%20projects%20typically%20look%20like.
Panopto | Unshared Knowledge Costs Money - https://www.panopto.com/resource/valuing-workplace-knowledge/