Jen McCown (Blog | Twitter) recently asked some tough questions about documentation in her blog post Documentation. Tag, your it! As a consultant I live and die by documentation. When I come into a engagement and things have been well documented my life is easier. More often than not the converse is true.
Stance on Documentation
Documentation is a necessity and I love it but I also hate it. Not unlike most of my colleagues I have a backlog of work that would keep me busy for the next year. Many times it is much easier to complete the task at hand and move on to the next one without taking the time to provide the documentation for the solution that I just finished.
Documentation and My Team
While I struggle with my personal love/hate relationship with documentation my team does a pretty good job of documenting our environment.
Requirements
There is never enough time to do it correct but there is always time to do it over again -Unknown
Properly documenting and understanding the scope of work for each task is the first rule in project management. Properly doing this helps minimize scope creep and control the quality of the work product. A huge part of project management is managing client expectations and if the requirements are documented, both client and my team know what to expect from each other.
Change Request
Change Request are very important to the stability of an IT environment. Documenting a change request is only one step in a change management policy that needs to be enforced in an environment.
Before implementing change management in our environment it was not uncommon to have unexpected outages during the course of a business day. This was never intentional but the many systems administrators, my self included, would make changes that would step on the actions of other administrators. This would cause unexpected consequences and a service interruption.
Post implementation of documenting change requests saw a drastic decrease in service interruption due to changes during the business day. It actually allowed us to increase service uptime numbers from 99.9 to 99.98 over 6 months.
Data Dictionary
We currently don’t have a Data Dictionary. This is mainly due to the amount of data that we would need to document. I was recently introduced by Jorge Segarra (Blog | Twitter) to a product from Red-Gate called SQLDoc. The product allows for quick and simple documentation of a database. I was smitten.
Shortly there after I was contacted by Bryan Kight (Blog | Twitter) about a product that his company has produced called BI Documenter. The product not only does what Red-Gate’s software does but so much more. Look for more information on this product in a future post.
