There seemed to be two opposing viewpoints -- oddly enough, from two physical sides of the room.
My bullet point summary follows:
- Why are people afraid of documentation?
- Makes it "real"
- Not enough time
- Documentation makes delegation possible
- Must be kept up to date
- Cost: overhead for every document you make
- Sometimes you'll write something and never look at it again
- Can documentation limit creativity? (depends on the type)
- Very important for remote teams
- Also important for new hires
- Organizing documentation is very difficult
- It should grow organically
- Document according to risk level
- Surgeons that document their process kill less people
- Helps "be kind to your future self"
- Example: Captain Picard and his log (had to be there to get this one -- awesome example :)
- People have many ways of learning -- writing helps think about problems differently
- Our brains are not designed for storage
- Lean aspect: Wait until there's real pain before documenting
And my own thoughts on the matter:
- I personally hate writing documentation, but...
- Our memories are more like goldfish than we think -- we forget stuff quick
- I document Lean Coffee out of necessity -- It's the only way I can justify the time invested to get some long-term learning that I can refer back to
- Documentation leads to Automation (and automation is very efficient/lean)
- Templates -- I only mentioned this briefly, but think it's ultra-important:
- Saves massive amounts of time with certain processes
- Again, leads to automation -- with a good, up-to-date template, I can create a proposal in 10 minutes that might have otherwise taken 3 hours
- You need to keep stuff in one place (or at least link the multiple sources together)
- Everything to do with my company is either in Google Docs or our project management system, and they both link to each other
- On the personal side of things, my girlfriend and I keep all important info in shared Google Docs and Google Calendars
- I've found that numbered lists or bullet points are better than paragraphs and sentences (since that's how we tend to think)
- Finally, I think that organizing documentation is far more important than simply creating it
- Perhaps you'd use some of your previous notes if they were actually somewhere you could find them :)
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