Effective Documentation for Organizations – Part 1

The hook – Meetings make a man go mumbly

Do you spent a lot of time in meetings? Chances are, you do. Already in 1973, managers twiddled their thumps happily away for the majority of their workdays [Mintzberg 1973].
_{^{Time flies with all that scotch and cigarettes.}}

It got even worse later on as meeting times tended to increase with another bump during corona and despite all that fancy technology [Tobia 1990, Romano 2001, Kost 2020].

An innocent bystander would assume that thanks to today’s interconnected working modes, productivity shot through the roof thanks to the additional meeting-time. But the opposite is the case.
_{^{We got rid of the booze, but where is the productivity?}}

More often than not, meetings waste money; a ton of money. From scheduling, to all the other parts of preparation and wrap up to the actual meeting time [Romano 2001, Eberly 2023].
You know those meetings where six and more people sit in a (virtual) room and listen to one person giving a status update about a project? Only a few other questions come up and then you all leave, feeling like you did it. Those kinda meetings fall into a category, elegantly called “a waste of time”.

You might feel like you worked, at least your brain tells you so. The reality is, that you set for an hour in a room and listened to a podcast.
^{And not even a good one.}

And worse yet, that feeling of having worked can turn ugly. Spending time with people we have to spent time with, even if it is virtually, causes significant fatigue. You don’t actually get anything done, but you mentally feel like you loaded a truck [Luong 2005]. You get tired, more easily annoyed and unhappy.

Too many meetings make people go buhbuh.

That way meetings can even accomplish the opposite of what they are intended for, meaning reduce productivity instead of increase it. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the negative effects from a single meeting can last for years [Kauffeld 2012]!
^{That’s what I call a time-efficient effect.}

But why am I writing about meetings here?
^{“Let me check the title again. Oh, jumped ahead in the planned content there a bit…or did I?” – Dramatically pulls off glasses.}

Documentation – The savior

In a previous article I tooted the horn for the not so secret superpower of documentation. And I spent good virtual ink here to give you a little insight into the effects of meetings because as it turns out, good documentation is a way to:

reduce meeting time and
make meetings more effective and efficient.

Documentation makes meetings go brrrrr.

Before I get to the core of the article, let me assure you that I don’t want to take away your meetings. Spending time with people (yes, also at work) is important and while my previous statement about the long term effects of bad meetings is true, the opposite is also true.
Good meetings increase productivity and are an important component of interorganizational relationship-building.
^{Meetings build culture and bring people together}

But wouldn’t you rather use meetings more efficient and effectively? Then let me tell you once more about…

…Documentation

This time we are taking a deeper look into documentation for organizations and its benefits. That means not only writing, drawing or filming stuff down and reading, listening or watching for yourself, but also for others within the same team, department, company, club, or whatever else groups of people call themselves. Therefore the focus shifts towards the distribution of thoughts, facts and results.

Some benefits for organizations

As we surely all remember documentation has a number of positive effects like:

extending our memory [Cunningham 2006]
better decision-making [Gagić 2019]
improved learning [Rivard 2000]
making yourself known ^{“Look at me now, mom” – Marx and Luther…probably, through the help of documentation”} [Brecht 1983, Marx 1996]
and many more. ^{Read the other article. It’s delightful, I promise.}

These benefits also hold true in organizations. They get even stronger, the more people use the same documentation system.

Documentation is a force multiplier.

Instead of only one person, the whole orga benefits from growing organizational knowledge [Yassine 2003]. Or let me put it another way: Every document, drawing or recording is picked up by a significantly more people, at the same or only marginally greater effort.

A few quick benefits we get from this attribute are reduced onboarding time and better products that are launched faster [Smith 1997]. Don’t believe me or Smith?
^{How could you? Smith (and Eppinger, don’t forget Eppinger) put so much work into the paper!}

When you have good documentation, a newly started person doesn’t need to bug others how to do or where to find what. They can read or watch videos to pick up the essentials.
^{Only holds true when processes are established enough. Otherwise onboarding via documentation goes boom.}

And in the case of product-development: Clear requirements-documentation is so essential I could write an entire article about it.
Don’t make him do it.

Documentation enables concurrency

Also I’ve seen so many teams not only run but crash into the wall of ambivalent goals that I lost count. The number of iterations that are necessary for a successful product development can also be reduced significantly, when decisions such as design-choices are well documented.
^{And don’t get him started on concurrent working modes. Oh no, there he goes…}

Documentation also gives you an edge when you work on multiple topics simultaneously. Our modern work environment often forces us to tackle more things than one.

At times I had more than 15 projects of varying sizes and complexities that I had to work on simultaneously. This meant organizing the project teams, keeping the stakeholders informed, assuring the clean recording of requirements and their smooth transition into the development process, resource management (because something has to be worked on after all and every developer-hour is its length worth in gold), risk management (because project-managers are supposed to see issues before they happen), budgeting, and a deal of numerous other things big and small.
Documentation was and still is my super power to keep an overview over all these projects and more tasks around it.
^{Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It is documentation-using-project-manager!}

The prejudice against documentation

Still, you might say, our organization is too agile for documentation. Changes occur too fast for things written down to offer the stated benefits. It would take way too much time and at every turn you would run the risk of duplicate documentation and other such sources of nasty mistakes.

“Ahh and now just writing about all and everything that happened today. Such a joy.”
No one, ever.

While those arguments are true, they are only symptoms of bad documentation-systems and insufficient organizational structures around those documentation systems.
^{Let the fingerpointing begin.}

Example 1 – Working with teams the old fashioned way

Imagine you are working in a >30 size company or other kind of organization. You have a task you need information for. So you go out and do the next best thing: You ask who might know what you are looking for. When you find them, they don’t have time right now. You better set a meeting. Being a good worker, you sit down, work through the calendars and make that appointment to have a meeting to discuss your questions.

In total, you spent effort to find the right person to ask, speak to them, set up a meeting (including a nice invite message with agenda and whatnot), prepare the meeting, have the meeting, wrap up the meeting and then use the information you originally wanted for whatever you need.

With a good documentation system, you get the task, use the impeccable search to find the necessary information, do whatever you need to do, and have time for a coffee with your friends to talk about that latest game you watched.

Example 2 – Working with chats – a state of the art

“No”, some readers might say. “We have internal chat programs, so we don’t need meetings. We can just ask them in the chat.”

First of all, great! Direct communication is wonderful…buuut let’s play through that scenario. You get again the task you need information for and don’t know from whom to get that information from. Instead of asking someone and setting up a meeting, you post the questions in the internal chat program (mail, slack, teams, whatever floats your goat). After a while you get an answer, continue with the task and have time for a coffee with your friends to talk about that latest game you watched.

Sounds great, right? …but in this case everyone and their mother in the channel you posted the question to, get a notification, which takes away their focus and time, and god forbid if one or more recipients ask followup-questions. You effectively transfer your problem to a much larger crowd, multiplying it by every person who reads that channel, in hopes that the right person will see your question and answer it before a whole avalanche of other people, who in turn go around and ask your original as well as follow up questions, breaks through.

And even if we assume that you know who has the right information, even then documentation would win in most cases. The reason for it is simple, because, as Kravcenko so perfectly put it:

“every hour invested into documentation by anyone saves literally x100 productivity hours across the company”
[Kravcenko 2023]

A look into how others handle documentation

No organization is too big or too small to successfully apply documentation – even an organization of one benefits from it.
Heck, it was first used to organize tribes, and keep track of hunting grounds, harvest in prehistoric times and business right after the invention of writing [Goody 1986, Valladas 2001]. If they managed to do it with rocks and sticks in a cave, I am sure we can.

And I still have to meet the company without an internal documentation system that succeeded.
^{S&P 500 style succeeded}

Outro

Ok, I think I made my point. Documentation rules and I am sure you are now all pumped to find out how to get documentation rolling in your organization.

To learn about some basic rules of good documentation, see part 2.
^{Oh, watch that cliffhanger go.}

Sources

Key	Citation
Brecht 1983	Brecht, M. (1983). Martin Luther, Band 1–3.
Cunningham 2006	Cunningham, G. E. (2006). Mindmapping: its effects on student achievement in high school biology. The University of Texas at Austin.
Eberly 2023	Ellie Eberly. 16 Eye-Opening Statistics About Time Spent in Meetings (Plus: Best practices for making them more effective). https://www.loom.com/blog/statistics-about-meetings
Gagić 2019	Gagić, Z. Z., Skuban, S. J., Radulović, B. N., Stojanović, M. M., & Gajić, O. (2019). The implementation of mind maps in teaching physics: educational efficiency and students’ involvement. Journal of Baltic Science Education, 18(1), 117-131.
Goody 1986	Goody, J. (1986). The logic of writing and the organization of society. Cambridge University Press.
Kauffeld 2012	Kauffeld, S., & Lehmann-Willenbrock, N. (2012). Meetings matter: Effects of team meetings on team and organizational success. Small group research, 43(2), 130-158.
Kost 2020	Danielle Kost. You’re Right! You Are Working Longer and Attending More Meetings. https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/you-re-right-you-are-working-longer-and-attending-more-meetings. 2020.
Kravcenko 2023	“Vadim Kravcenko. “every hour invested into documentation by anyone saves literally x100 productivity hours across the company”. https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/proper-documentation/. 2023.”
Luong 2005	Luong, A., & Rogelberg, S. G. (2005). Meetings and more meetings: The relationship between meeting load and the daily well-being of employees. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 9(1), 58.
Marx 1996	Marx, K. (1996). Das Kapital (F. Engels, Ed.). Regnery Publishing.
Mintzberg 1973	Mintzberg, H. (1973). The nature of managerial work.
Rivard 2000	Rivard, L. P., & Straw, S. B. (2000). The effect of talk and writing on learning science: An exploratory study. Science education, 84(5), 566-593.
Romano 2001	Romano, N. C., & Nunamaker, J. F. (2001, January). Meeting analysis: Findings from research and practice. In Proceedings of the 34th annual Hawaii international conference on system sciences (pp. 13-pp). IEEE.
Smith 1997	Smith, R. P., & Eppinger, S. D. (1997). Identifying controlling features of engineering design iteration. Management science, 43(3), 276-293.
Tobia 1990	Tobia, P. M., & Becker, M. C. (1990). Making the most of meeting time. Training & Development Journal, 44(8), 34-39.
Valladas 2001	Valladas, H., Clottes, J., Geneste, J. M., Garcia, M. A., Arnold, M., Cachier, H., & Tisnérat-Laborde, N. (2001). Evolution of prehistoric cave art. Nature, 413(6855), 479-479.
Yassine 2003	Yassine, A., & Braha, D. (2003). Complex concurrent engineering and the design structure matrix method. Concurrent Engineering, 11(3), 165-176.