Documentation is a key driver to successful projects

Journey: 📊 Community Builder 📊

Subject matter: 💡 Thought Leadership 💡

After spending 15 years working in enterprise-level IT environments, I have found one of the most important drivers to longevity and customer success in an area you might not expect…

Documentation.

You can have all the skilled engineers, but without environmental documentation, you risk project creep and knowledge loss if someone leaves the organisation.

When new engineers join our team, which oversees a large number of data centers it is easy to be completely overwhelmed with information. I have seen it many times over the years.

• Who is the customer?
• What are the core processes?
• What are the common incidents received?
• What are the SLAs?
• What are the permitted boundaries to fix faults without changing design?
• How do you know what the design is supposed to be to understand if you are changing it?
• Who do I escalate to?
• What does the Org structure look like?
• How do I bill my hours?
• How do I prioritise my time when tasked with work by multiple managers at the same time?

The questions are endless.

Documenting the project journey from early contract pursuit through to design, delivery, and transition to live is vital to being able to drive a project forward.

Documentation looks at:

• Contractual agreements
• Strategy understanding
• Design agreements
• Transition procedures
• Operational requirements
• Continual improvement

Hang on a minute, this looks a little like the ITIL product lifecycle!

One of the core principles AWS covets is Customer Obsession.

“Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.” -Citation

It might not sound exciting but Documentation enables this principle. It removes ambiguity and ensures everyone understands a set of requirements.

Setting the standard

Over the years, I have written hundreds of process and knowledge base articles. These are all housed in a SharePoint site that I designed to provide a collaborative environment with our colleagues, industry partners, and our customers.

Since designing and building this set of Document Libraries, it has received over 125,000 site visits in the last two years. This just goes to show how important effective documentation and information management is when delivering enterprise-level initiatives.

From an operational perspective, well-written knowledge base documentation can significantly lower the RTO [Recovery Time Objective] in large-scale outages. From this perspective alone, this would delight the customer as you have got them back online quicker than they could have expected.

Part of my current role serves as a Knowledge Admin and documentation Impact Assessor. The article above is why I insist on the highest standards in published documents.