Let's Talk About Documentation

One of the most common challenges I run into when creating training, is a lack of documentation of what we are supposed to be training people to do. In my experience, this is especially problematic in new or smaller companies.

A couple of months ago I met MJ Hurley of Hurley Write, a company devoted to helping companies improve their writing and documentation practices. Next week’s episode of the Making Better Podcast is a discussion with MJ about how companies can improve their SOPs.

You can watch it early here.

One topic we didn’t get into was the organization of documentation. Even when a company starts documentation early, they often have trouble keeping it organized. Just like training, if people can’t find the documentation, it might as well not exist.

However, there are two simple was I have found to get started with organizing documentation, that just about any company can utilize.

• Share Drives

• Highlander DocumentsShare Drives

Share Drives

I know a lot of companies that use Google for their company storage. The biggest problem with GDrive is keeping track of where things are. Documents are created and shared with others, but unless you take note of the link, it will be impossible to find again.

That is where Share Drives come in. Rather than documents living with the person who created it, they will all live in a common drive and thus can be easily found later on. These drives can also have permissions associated with them so you don’t have to worry about who has access to which document.

Master Documents

Another solution to the challenge of losing documents is to create a Highlander Document. The name comes from the 80’s classic movie and Sean Connery’s amazing line “There can be only one.”

The idea is to create a single document that all other documentation is linked to. It can provide a way to organize documents and also create a single place for everyone to go to find everything else.

Documentation isn’t normally a training problem, until it stops us from being able to train effectively. Having a bit of understanding of effective documentation practices is essential for any small training team.