A Treatise on Documentation

"Where documentation is concerned, formalized procedures should be used sparingly, as keeping them up to date can require considerable effort. It is therefore important to avoid overdocumenting the process. Administrators, for instance, can reasonably be expected to know the tools with which they are working, and procedures that document routine system administration tasks in detail do not add a lot of value. The correct solution to this issue is to provide adequate training. If procedures start to resemble conveyor belts, motivation is likely to drop sharply. To overdocument procedures is to demonstrate a lack of confidence in your people."

-- A Practical Guide to Managing Information Security

Overdocumentation can be a result of many different factors, including:

• Incomplete understanding of the requirements and intent of the standards
• The wrong approach to corrective actions
• Not fully addressing what's important to the business or management when creating the documentation

If the quality system is set up based on any combination of these situations, personnel begin to ignore it and companies begin taking short cuts.

Eventually, employees become uncertain of what's required, what's a guideline and what can generally be ignored. This can be done while maintaining good quality products and services, but, again, only for the short term. Employees, over time, don't know what paperwork or system to attend to and which to overlook. Nothing written can be considered important. The overriding culture requires pleasing management, shipping product and ignoring paperwork and other system requirements. Such companies end up worse off because they've lost the informal systems and culture that made them successful in the first place. The implicit culture familiar to employees holds that no paperwork is valuable and the “boss” doesn't do what he says through the formal, documented system.

The natural progression from this scenario is that these documented systems begin to fail. The usual issues, like employee turnover and new product launches, add to the bottleneck. Negative trends show up in your metrics, quality concerns increase and profits diminish. Safety and environmental issues may begin to surface. Your documented system has become an exceptional-looking “show car” that has nothing inside. It looks good, but it won't take you anywhere. You spend all of your time fixing problems instead of improving your processes. Your company culture doesn’t support the system or the changes.

In truth, if a good system is put in place and if employees are trained and motivated to use it properly, compliance to the standards should benefit the entire company. A correctly documented and implemented system will take no additional time and will be able to drive improvement and keep a company competitive.

Following are some solutions to keep your documented system working properly:

• Get rid of all unnecessary paperwork. It's better to start with less and fine-tune as you go.
• Train everyone—management and employees—on a simpler system.
• Motivate employees to follow the system and to recommend changes.
• Set goals and keep everyone in the company accountable.
• Continuously improve systems.