Documentation mindset for teams

There are a lot of nebulous problems in communication inside organizations. Documentation is not fancy, and teams to neglected.

To progress with documentation efforts, focus on essential but small projects for the organization. Start small with something that you can nail.

Solve the issue of documentation around a single internal project in the Engineering organization.

Define a simple outline to follow and assign a point of contact to track execution and progress.

To expand the documentation, define top-level categories in a wiki or standard knowledge management system. e.g., Project documentation, Operations documentation, Playbooks, Monitoring Information, Best Practices, and Style Guides.

Schedule a weekly standing meeting to keep track of the progress along all the stages.

The Agile Manifesto suggests working software because code is an objective measure of progress. Yet, the onboarding process requires formal documentation to ramp up people to the team’s culture faster.

Working software over comprehensive documentation.[¹]

Writing code is more productive, but documentation about the team’s past and decisions is equally important.

—

[¹]: Agile Manifesto https://agilemanifesto.org/