Why Centralizing Documentation is Essential

Building on yesterday's newsletter about assigning an owner to every business process and system, your organization (not just a department or group) needs to centralize its documentation.

The goal of is to ensure that everyone in your organization knows there is one place to look if they have questions:

•  About how a business process works
• Where it fits within the overall organization
• What systems are involved and how to use them

The benefits of this approach allow your stakeholders to easily identify who they should reach out to when:

•  An improvement is identified
• An exception occurs or bug is found
• They're curious about what changes to expect in the near term
• They're interested in what else has been requested or considered by other stakeholders

All of those enable teams to work more efficiently and have greater impact as your organization grows.

The owner of a process or system is accountable for keeping their docs updated, and the responsibility of that work can be on them or a delegate.

As an aside, if you're curious about the difference between accountability and responsibility, take a look at how and when to use RACI.

If your organization has varying quality or disparate documentation, prioritize your focus on these three areas:

1. Summary that defines what the business process or system is along with its owner, plus links to the next two types of docs
2. Interaction-based scripts to define an outcome, which stakeholder group is involved, prerequisites, steps to take, and where to go next
3. Visualizations that show how a process works, and how that integrates into the overall organization and its systems

You can read more about the benefits of interaction based scripts and how to overcome the barriers to visualizing your processes and systems to get a refresher.

Release notes, roadmaps, backlogs, and a whole slew of other types of documentation are not present on that list, which is by design.

Don't burden yourself and your organization with trying to accomplish too much from the outset.

The baseline of those three types of docs above is more than sufficient to get you in a better place than most organizations, and it will make a lot of things easier, like:

•  Determining how proposed changes impact things
• Onboarding new team members or vendors
• Troubleshooting exceptions

TLDR: Centralized docs makes it easier for teams to operate and grow, and there are only three types of docs you need to get started with your foundation.