Background

While Documentation might not be the most sexy topic with colourful relevant pictures, it is a fundamentally important topic. Recently I had a fairly heated discussion on the (how much) use of documentation, where the argumentation of “Trust me” was brought up to argue against documentation within a project. This difference ultimately led to the (temporarily) halting of the project, there are too many instances I have seen this lack of dedication/professionalism leading to failure down the line.

Reasons for Documentation

When talking about ‘Documentation’ I refer to the documentation of both informational items, decisions and actions, the latter both before (‘planning’) and after (‘report’) their execution. (See my previous post on how all text can be divided into these three categories.)

There are two main reasons why documentation is important. The first one is negative: ‘fear’, the need for traceability in a regulated environment. To ‘survive’ an audit – whether it be a business one like ISO 9001 or a governmental one like Anti-trust – the burden of proof has been reversed: there is no presumption of innocence, one has to prove that one has obeyed the rules. In case of non-compliance any penalties – amongst which one can rank a deviation in an ISO-matrix organization – become larger with the size of the organization. Hundreds of millions of Euro’s of governmental fines are no exception any more and some European governments have reportedly set up special task forces on such a business plan. No documentation means no proof.

The second reason for documentation is positive: ‘reliability’, the need for transparency to generate trust and or guarantee success: if we want to implement a change in an organization that change generates uncertainty for all involved, especially the employees. Transparency by means of a planning (who will do what when) provides certainty, as long as it is followed up later and reported how that planning – with all it’s last moment deviations – has been implemented. If documentation or communication is not required the change is an activity simple enough that one can perform it alone and not worthy of the title of ‘project’. For any real project one can say that no documentation means the project is ‘Out Of Control’.

Degree of documentation

We all hear about excessive documentation requirements: from thousands of employees per bank working on nothing but preventing money laundering, to care professional spending enormous amounts of time (although the time spent on overhead usually is badly documented) on registration of their actions, leaving them seven minutes to apply socks (and many professionals leaving the business because they want to “take care, not take notes”).

Below a couple of rules of thumb one can use:

• If you meet, there must be a reason. If there is a reason to meet, you discuss meaningful things, if you structurally do not have anything to register, you probably have not discussed anything meaningful.
• If you only register those items that are tested at a Quality Gate or ‘Go-Live decision’ you probably are ‘missing the point’, the activity is not a project but ‘running down a checklist’ .
• Risks should always be inventoried ‘bottom up’ but extended by an overall ‘inventory’ based on lessons learned. A good Project Management Office has a suggestion available.
• Risks should contain at least both content risks for the activity on hand, and generic project management risks.
• 10-20 risks for a small project (100k) are not uncommon, although many risks may be considered to be ‘low likelihood’.

Similarly, one can say about a meeting structure:

• If there is no need for a structured meeting set-up, you probably have no need for a project.
• The more professional the team (with an agenda sent out beforehand, and participants being on time, having read up on the topics, being involved in them, with professional expertise) the shorter time required per topic.
• The biggest waste of time is every participant informing the others what they have done lately, justifying their own (professional) involvement. That kind of information can be shared independently, the F2F (or E2E) meeting is for interaction, to decide, analyze or agree on actions.
• The more stable a team (both with respect to forming/storming/norming and to ‘political influences’) the less time required per topic.
• Five minutes discussion for a topic seems minimum, unless it is just a ‘nodding through’
• The higher up in the organization the highest-ranking official, the better prepared the topic needs to be. The (documentation) time required goes up logarithmically.