Producing Documentation

I had an extremely interesting conversation with my boss today regarding documentation.

I work in the IT industry and there seems to be a mistaken belief amongst some that not documenting certain processes will preserve ones job role.

Maybe…

To me, it illustrates couple bad things…

Laziness
On two levels… the first is simply one may be too lazy to document… they don’t want to open up word, sharepoint, the wiki, onenote or whatever tool you use to document what it takes to do what you did… the second is more long term, whatever process that was learned may have been difficult to find out, there may have been gotchas, nuances that made the solution very difficult to come by and now they want to rest on their laurels.  They don’t want to learn anything else.

Poor Team Player
These types forge their own little empires within their workspace.  They want people to come to them for certain tasks and want to dictate pace and workflow on their terms.  There is is no way for this person to hand off these tribal tasks to someone else to go and run with it.

Fear of Peer Review
When a person documents, they are declaring to the team and maybe a wider audience what they know.  There is a fear that what they know, may be wrong, or worse, someone may have a better solution and may upstage their work.

Disorganized
Failure to document usually leads to disorganization.  If one makes a change to fix a problem today, why was it changed?  Will you know why tomorrow?  Will you know why next year?  As time goes on, all that stuff in that person’s head WILL get jumbled and confused.

Earlier in this blog post I said “maybe…” and here is why, you will be stuck in a position that only you can do, where you cannot branch out, extend and grow.  You will be stuck doing the same job, because only you can do it, whereas others can hand the job off.  Let’s look at those characteristics from another the opposite site.

Organized
When you document, you will show to everyone you can keep track of many things and be able to reference back to them.  Because everything has its place and you can do more things. You can take on new more interesting projects because your manager will trust the documentation you provide will help the organization, you can do bigger more meaningful projects.

Welcome Peer Review
Yes it is an ego thing if you are wrong, get over it. Being a professional, I would like to know I am wrong and fix the problem so I don’t make things worse.  You will learn how to do things more.  Over 20 years, I have been wrong many times, I have done some stupid things, I don’t make too many errors anymore.  So I absolutely welcome peer review because it keeps me moving towards perfection and peer acceptance.  To me, its better to admit a mistake and make it right, then to have it blow up later down the road. Also, if something goes wrong, there will be a greater understanding of why things went wrong.

Understands being a Team Player
There is this goal that an organization tries to achieve, its usually written in some mission statement, or contract, etc.  But there is a goal and it is much easier to reach that goal if you work as a team.   Keeping tribal knowledge weakens the team, because you have less skills throughout to make the team strong and there is less of an understanding on what your team mates tendencies are.  For example, say you are a great at account creation, you teach others how to create accounts, all the little details are documented, where home directories are and password requirements.  When a user has trouble accessing their home directories, the person in charge of the file server can look at the process without the original account creator to resolve this problem more quickly.

Does (Makes) More
Originally I titled this works hard to counter the laziness tag, but really, a person that documents properly will be able to do more and the new stuff they do will be interesting.  Think of it from a management’s point of view, this person shows he can document, shows he can do more, shows a willingness to educate peers.  The organization as a whole is way better off.  This person completed this project, this person fixed this problem, this person is willing to learn, this person is willing to get criticized. Who do you think will make more?

Me personally, I would place odds on the player that documents better.

So what does this have to do with a blog that primarily focuses on training and weightloss.  Well first off recall that this is a new blog and I want to add more than just weight loss, but more importantly, I want to document, my weight loss methods so people will critique me and so I can do things maybe better.

Hit gym today, can’t work out as hard as I usually do per Doctors orders.  She said gradually work into it over the course of a week.