4 Traps That Undermine Documentation Culture

Are you happy with the state of your company’s documentation? For most of you, I’m guessing there are some things you want to improve. And that’s the rub – having the best tool is a great start, but it’s not everything. The best documentation system in the game works best when there is a strong documentation culture to support it. It’s highly unlikely your MSP has an organizational culture expert on staff, which is why you’re bound to have at least one of these traps impeding your documentation culture from being at its greatest level. So let’s unpack the four biggest traps that undermine your documentation culture – and how to get rid of them.

Trap #1 – Your Documentation is a Mess

The better your documentation is, the easier it is to see its value. It’s kind of a catch-22, right? But let’s set aside the folks who don’t even have documentation, because they know what they need to do, and focus on the folks who’ve got a fair bit of documentation but aren’t getting a ton of value from it. Maybe the naming conventions are inconsistent so nobody can find anything. Maybe the architecture is all over the place. These issues usually arise when there is no one person in charge of developing architecture and naming conventions. Make sure you have one person who has the final say over how your documentation will be structured, and that they are communicating effectively with the rest of the team. If every tech documents the way they think is best, you’ll end up with as many documentation styles as techs, if not more. So make sure everybody does it the same way, because that consistency is the key to usability, and usability is the key to extracting value and building a stronger documentation culture. Make the SOP on naming conventions the very first document you load into IT Glue so there’s no guesswork.