To Document or Not To Document

As Lean Coffee TO's unofficial "documenter", I found our discussion on documentation very enlightening.

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 :)