Importance of good document management

The Importance of Good Document Management

Globalization means that workplaces are ever more geographically dispersed. This means that documents are also used more than ever by people in several countries and continents for communicating and collaborating.

You will see communication problems even between employees in the same office because they do not have easy access to the documents that they need. You find some documents kept by someone in the accounts office, shared directories that serve everybody, some documents in paper form, others in electronic form – quite a free-for-all.

An explosion in the number of documents that a company needs does not help. If their storage and indexation are badly organized, these documents become useless because they are almost impossible to find.

The results of poor document management can lead to a significant loss of time. Ask yourself how often you find yourself looking for:

• A supplier catalogue that has been sent to a purchasing manager,
• A customer contract signed several months ago,
• The final set of Terms and Conditions offered to a specific customer,
• The documents required for employing a new member of staff,
• An order confirmation sent by a customer to one of your salespeople or, perhaps even more common, when the relevant salesperson has gone on vacation, if you ever received such an order confirmation,
• A procedure from your quality manual if there has been a process fault,
• An email which was sent to one of your colleagues,
• A document that you need to be a template for a specific type of contract,
• A complete history of communications between yourselves and a supplier about a given contract.

Even worse than the loss of time, perhaps, the lack of good document management is bad for the quality of your organization and the service provided by your company. In such a company it is likely that:

• sets of documents do not follow a standard layout,
• all the salespeople prepare quotations in their own way and gradually change the way they do it for themselves but not for the group,
• a correction to a type of contract stays with a small group of people and does not percolate back into the rest of the company to benefit other users,
• version management is chaotic or even non-existent.

So a good integrated document management system can be a powerful tool to help in day-to-day company management. With it you could also easily:

• Continue the work started by a colleague if she has gone on vacation, and respond to her customers if needed,
• Get hold of examples of all document types with just a few clicks, so that you can follow company standards in such areas as order confirmation, price requests, meeting minutes, customer deliverables, contract examples, and models for faxes and letters,
• Retrieve procedures and other associated documents if you do not know how to do a certain task – such as things you should do when hiring a new employee, organizing a conference, or structuring meeting minutes,
• Reuse work done by a colleague to meet similar needs and build on all the individual work done in your own company,
• Find all the orders for a customer or from a supplier in just a few seconds to answer questions or to continue a discussion when the initial contact point in your company is not available,
• Build on your working methods and enable your colleagues to benefit from each improvement in a document type or a procedure.

From these examples you can see the importance of a good document management system, and what it might contribute to the improvement of productivity and the quality of the output from each employee.

http://doc.openerp.com/v6.0/book/7/7_19_Documents/7_19_Documents_importance.html

The Importance of documentation in workplace

Documentation, the recording of organizational structures, policies, actions, and goals, is vital to any business, and doubly so for those of us in development. When I came on board I inherited roughly 200,000 lines of code that I had to learn well enough to find and pinpoint individual errors, within the span of about a week. While experience and clues from within the code help somewhat, the job would be nearly impossible without documentation of some kind. And documentation will continue to be important going forward: with so much to manage, it's unlikely I'll remember exactly what a particular piece of code does even a few months down the line unless I leave some easily understandable record. Even outside of the development world, documentation plays a fundamental role in business. It codifies procedures, ensuring everyone in the company does things the same way (hopefully the right way!). It streamlines processes, allowing people to look up answers instead of asking coworkers or reinventing the wheel. And it acts as protection during audits, helping to pinpoint any actions taken against policy. So, how should documentation be developed and integrated into your business practices?

First, it's important to develop your documentation alongside the actual process. Too often developers take the attitude, "Code first, document later." That would be fine if we could stick to it. But in practice it tends to become, "Code first, then code something else, and put off documentation for another time." Instead, you have to consider documentation a priority, updating it while the work you've done is fresh in your mind. Will that make you work slower? At first, yes, but over the long run it should save you time. Instead of thinking of documentation as something that hampers your real work, consider it as part of that work. You can't set aside part of your job because it's slowing down another part.

Second, streamline your documentation process to require the least amount of extra work. It's especially important not to duplicate information. When I'm documenting code, for example, it's often possible to intersperse the code and the documenting comments so that half of the documentation is the code itself. That way I'm not duplicating information by writing it once in code and once in the documentation. Another possibility is to set up automatic documentation procedures, so that you only need to manually fill in specific information. I have a Google document to record changes I make: it automatically fills in several fields for me, and other fields are set up to ease entering that information. This took a bit of extra effort to set up at first, but it reduces the ongoing work.

Third, be sure to structure your documentation. If you're documenting your work as you do it, it's likely that the documentation will be close to the actual work, both in detail and in location. That is wonderfully helpful when you're already looking at a specific piece of work, but what if you're trying to find that piece among all the rest? For that, you need higher-level documentation that gives the general structure of your work, explaining each piece and where to find it. It might also be helpful to give pointers to this general documentation from the specific pieces so you will be able to follow it back. However you choose to do it, make sure that your documentation gives a clear starting point to someone who doesn't already know what they're doing. Hunting for the right documentation is often just as frustrating as trying to understand the work itself.

As I come to grips with the code I have to work with and the duties I'm expected to perform, I'll be reading, updating, and creating the documentation to go with them. I'm hoping that with these principles I can efficiently create documentation enabling me and anyone else who reads it to get up to speed quickly and get the work done.

http://www.plumbersurplus.com/Blog/post/2009/04/07/The-Importance-of-Documentation-in-the-Workplace.aspx