What is documentation for businesses?

What is documentation?

Documentation vs Knowledge Base: an explanation

Types of documentation

• Technical: Includes detailed information about a product’s design and is typically used internally by the development/ engineering team. It may have code examples, troubleshooting guides, and schematics. Some documentation may be suited to technical support or customers experiencing technical issues.
  
  
• User: Tends to be external and customer-facing items, including user manuals, quick start guides, FAQs and tutorials.
  
  
• Project: This records the planning, execution, and results of a project to ensure transparency, accountability, and future reference, consisting of project plans, reports, schedules, and documentation of project scope and objectives.
  
  
• Legal: Contains essential information, such as contracts, agreements, and licences with customers and suppliers.
  
  
• Business Process: Describes workflows, procedures, and processes within an organisation and can be accessed to find organisational plans, flowcharts, roadmaps and similar critical documents.
  
  
• Compliance: Crucial for any business wanting to stay on the right side of legislation, including details of policies, procedures, and audit reports to demonstrate adherence to standards.
  
  
• Training: Provides training materials for employees or users, encompassing training manuals, videos, and interactive modules for skill development, usually most often used during onboarding.

Why documentation is essential

• It encourages employees to access information independently, fostering self-sufficiency.
• It promotes quality control by setting clear standards and procedures, ensuring that teams meet quality benchmarks.
• It helps organisations retain and maintain knowledge long after employees leave.

A step-by-step guide to good documentation

1. Understand the gaps in your organisation, e.g. a need to document more processes or procedures to have clarity on what you hope to achieve with your documentation.
   
   
2. Select the right technology. Documentation tools and platforms are here to help with creating and managing your documentation. The right document management systems aren’t just repositories; they ensure that the knowledge you store is collaborative and ever-adapting. Ensure you use technology that is designed to protect you against data loss, with plans for disaster recovery and solid admin controls.
   
   
3. Establish documentation standards. You need guidelines and frameworks for teams to work with, from templates to naming conventions and storage rules for the perfect document hierarchy. Lay the foundations for easy access and maintenance. Ensure version control and tracked changes are in place.
   
   
4. Create and launch. Work with multiple business stakeholders to contribute and review content before you launch.
   
   
5. Review. How is the documentation being received and used? Do you need to go back and update to a more intuitive navigation structure or hierarchy? Allow and encourage feedback.