Your documentation sucks… but it doesn’t have too

Every week, how much time do you think a developer spends trying to find answers to questions? A recent study found that they spend around 7 hours per week looking for information. Almost one day per week!

The same developers also waste around 9 hours additional hours of your organizational experts time to get their questions answered. Ok, now for every developer, every week, they are wasting two full days to get questions answered.

The worst part is that around 40% of those questions are redundant. To state that a little differently, the developer should have been able to find their answer via some kind of documentation. So why is it so hard to find the information they need to get their jobs done?

The major culprit is that we look at documentation as a singular problem. We have boiled it down to “just needing to write things down so that other people can find it” without much of a plan, process, or governance. Don’t get me wrong, documentation is hard… no doubt about that, but we need to think about this problem a little differently

Knowledge Management is a deliberate focus on improving documentation of specific kinds of knowledge and providing them back in a clear, concise, and easy to access manner. When you think about documentation as a knowledge management problem it becomes very clear that this is more than a singular problem. It’s many problems for many different people and requires different systems for each.

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