Demystifying Documentation: Jen Bergren Tackles Top FAQs
Jen Bergren is an expert in creating and delivering educational experiences that empower individuals to grow their careers and businesses. With her experience building an agency from scratch, Jen possesses a unique perspective that guides her in developing effective plans, processes, and programs. Her track record includes successfully implementing a knowledge management program, an award-winning employee onboarding program, and a remarkable referral partner program.
Currently, Jen is focused on creating various online courses and writing a book on RevOps, integrating her passion for research, writing, and lifelong learning.
Today, Jen dives deep into addressing leaders' most pressing questions about documentation. As a long-time admirer of Jen's work, I have personally experienced her willingness to answer questions and share her invaluable insights. Her practical advice is always instantly applicable and immensely helpful.
At Velocity, documentation is vital to our work, particularly as we lead transformation projects across diverse industries. While it may seem like a simple discipline, akin to running a successful meeting, few leaders and organizations truly excel at it.
In the following interview, Jen clarifies the relationship between documentation and productivity, adoption, risk management, cost efficiency, and getting started. This is an interview that you won't want to keep to yourself. Jen offers profound wisdom that deserves your undivided attention. Take the time to absorb her valuable insights and share them with others.
Productivity
Why is documentation important in the workplace?
There are so many reasons why documentation is important!
Though there are many types of documentation that are important, in this case, I’m referring to business process documentation, the instructions on how to do the work and how the business works.
Much of the online information is about the business case for why documentation is important, such as efficiency, consistency, repeatability for scaling, and not losing essential business knowledge when team members leave. These are all great reasons why leadership should create a documentation culture.
Speaking of culture, I also like to emphasize the personal or individual level (human level) reasons why documentation is important.
These reasons include:
Reducing the stress and mental load it takes to remember how to perform the hundreds of different tasks and processes in each role
Saving creative brainpower for the more interesting work of creating new or improved processes when you’re not spending so much mental energy simply repeating an existing process
Empowering team members to learn new tasks with less uncertainty or fear of failure
Providing equal access to knowledge to all levels of roles
Creating a greater understanding of how the whole business works and how people’s roles play a meaningful part in it
Making training and onboarding easier and faster for people to feel confident in their roles sooner
Reducing stress in another way from the efficiency gains of using documentation, meaning fewer working hours are needed
Facilitating delegation so leaders can reduce their own workload with less fear of errors and less time answering repeated questions about the delegated tasks
Encouraging team members to actually use their paid time off since the team knows that other people can take over the work when they are out of the office, and they won’t return to a mountain of tasks to catch up on urgently
The list goes on and on! I also recently spoke with some additional experts to get their thoughts on why documentation is important and split out some of the reasons by role in this article.
From a leadership perspective, these individual benefits for yourself and your team create happier team members and a more positive and productive culture, which research says leads to happier customers and more profits.
How can documentation improve productivity and efficiency?
When thinking of productivity as the rate that your work is completed, a dictionary definition that is probably over-simplified, the fast answer is that documentation can improve productivity by not needing to take the time to recreate the wheel and invent (or remember) a new way of completing a process every time you do it. So it will take less time to complete the same work; when you eliminate the time, people are guessing what to do, procrastinating the work since they are unsure about it, or waiting for an answer to a question of how to do the work.
Besides being measurable (if you’re tracking time and other metrics), on a more human level, productivity is also a feeling. If your team feels like they are completing quality work, on time, without impossible workloads, without uncertainty in how to do the work, and without bottlenecks when they are waiting for someone to answer a question that could have been answered by documentation, they will feel more productive and be more engaged in their work.
You, as the leader, will feel more productive if you have time for your big focused work that will achieve the company goals, instead of spending so much time re-answering repeated questions, re-explaining how to do the same tasks or how processes work, or stuck in meetings that could have been solved with shared documentation.
As for efficiency, using an oversimplified definition of doing the work without waste and documenting processes can help you see where to streamline and improve the work for efficiency. Using the documentation reduces the errors that create the need for re-work time, increasing efficiency. Team members sharing knowledge by documenting also means that the process is run the same way each time and that it is possible to see more ways to optimize it for further efficiency.
Boosting team productivity identifies four ways teams can improve productivity, so I’ll also use that as a framework here:
Prioritization: Documentation helps leaders prioritize their most important work for themselves and their teams. If there is clear information on how the processes work, there is less time needed for one-on-one training or answering questions for the less important tasks, so more time can be spent completing important work. If processes are visible, it’s also easier to see what may need to be prioritized, created, or improved first to achieve goals.
Automation: You can’t automate something if you don’t know how it works or if you don’t know every step of what exactly needs to be automated. Having documentation can assist in deciding what processes or parts of processes to automate and what still needs a human touch by clearly seeing all the context and steps involved.
Delegation: A big roadblock for leaders in delegating their work is the time to train each person on each delegated task or process, correct their errors, and answer questions as the team member does the work. Documentation relieves this stress and time on both sides of the relationship and allows for smoother delegation.
Scheduling: If you don’t know all the steps and dependencies in a process, you won’t know how much time or other resources are needed to complete it. Your schedule will not be accurate unless the work you are scheduling has been documented (including documenting the time and effort involved). Your schedule will also be more accurate if you have documentation that prevents many errors that cause your day to be filled with reactive fire-fighting work, a common cause of delayed project schedules.
What are the best practices for creating and maintaining documentation?
Starting small is the top best practice I recommend to overcome the overwhelm that prevents people from starting a documentation practice. Part of this philosophy is not to feel bad about yourself or your company if you're not already creating and maintaining documentation, which can contribute to even more procrastination for starting. Remember that most companies are not doing it, so you’re already ahead of the curve by thinking about starting it!
For more tactical advice, start creating documentation by documenting the work you do yourself for your first ten or so pieces of documentation. This will help you to get in the habit and test out templates and other information. Then you can start thinking about more difficult documentation work across team members.
If you are in a leadership role, you may want to appoint a team member to be in charge of the documentation efforts as a project owner to get the initiative started, but you still need to be visibly involved and support the efforts in order to lead by example. If you delegated the writing part of the work, you should be making yourself available to meet with this project owner so they can extract that process knowledge from your head, and get back to them with your edits in a timely manner. Show the team that this is important.
Do not start with tool research! Performing tool research is a common error and is really a form of procrastination. You don’t need a new, special tool if you don’t have any documentation written yet. Once you have some documents created, you can consider a knowledge base or other tools.
If you have a big fear of the blank page, use whatever meeting or audio recording/transcribing tool you already have to record yourself talking through the process, then transcribe it as a first draft. Other tools are dedicated to this, but you don’t need anything fancy just to start. Use what you have.
To maintain documentation, the key is to have systems and roles in place to divide the work among the team clearly. One person cannot do it all; that is setting the initiative and the person up for failure. You’ll want to ingrain just-in-time updates to documentation into your culture and make communication about documentation visible, and you also need to have recurring tasks and notifications to check through the documentation on a regular basis to ensure it is up-to-date.
One of the biggest reasons why people won’t use documentation is they don’t trust it is up-to-date, so you’ll need to combat this with visible maintenance processes and management accountability that they are completed.
Adoption
What strategies can leaders implement to encourage employees to prioritize documentation?
This is a great question! I hear that a big blocker to documentation is that leaders tell their team NOT to prioritize documentation since it can be hard to attribute to profits or billable work directly.
For the leaders who recognize the importance of documentation, a few ways they can encourage their team to create, use, and keep it up-to-date include:
Lead by example. Be visibly involved in documentation efforts, whether as a subject matter expert being interviewed for documentation creation, the approver of documentation of specific processes, or simply a champion who frequently communicates about the value of documentation.
Give people time to do this work. Don’t add it to an already impossible workload; expect it to happen magically. Help the team reserve time for it by de-prioritizing and rescheduling less important work if needed.
Communicate the benefits. Use different communication formats to remind people of the WHY behind doing this work. Documentation is a long game, and people don’t remember information they only hear once. Repeat the benefit information in multiple formats.
Reward people doing the work. Show the team that you value documentation by giving shoutouts in meetings, Slack, or other communication channels, such as sharing a “wiki of the week” and its related team. Build documentation duties into promotion plans and the roles leading to management.
Normalize it. Communicate about it often, not just about the benefits, but about the completed work, so they get used to seeing it and being reminded to do it. This shows it’s something many team members do, not just one person’s duty.
Make it easy to be successful by setting up systems that make the work manageable. Build a system of project management, time management, communication, and storage, with clear roles and responsibilities so everyone knows what to do and how to do it. And, of course, this includes having documentation about documentation!
How can documentation align with an organization's overall strategic goals?
Until you document and make your processes consistent and repeatable, you can’t forecast or predict any results, so you won't be able to plan realistic goals or accurate milestones to complete them.
Documentation can also help make it possible to accomplish the goals. For example, let’s say the company’s strategic goal is to increase sales. Hiring more people may work until a certain point, and results will plateau, leaving you with additional people to pay but not any additional sales.
If every salesperson is doing their work in a different way and there is no clear, consistent, repeatable sales process, it will be difficult to identify improvements that will increase sales. What is working well that every team member should do? What is not working well that no team member should do? You won’t know unless you go through the process of creating and maintaining documentation.
If by some chance you do manage to accomplish a goal without doing any documentation, you won’t be able to repeat that success because what action you took to accomplish the goal is not documented. A few people might remember certain actions or activities that contributed toward success, but they won’t remember every step in order and all the context involved.
In addition, consider the effect of employee turnover, especially in the past year. If the path to that goal’s success is not documented, the knowledge or intellectual property left with the departing team members makes it impossible to repeat or maintain the goal’s success.
How can documentation support knowledge-sharing and onboarding processes?
Documentation itself is knowledge sharing! (If you actually share it and don’t hide it on personal drives or with strict viewing permissions.)
If you “rebrand” documentation as knowledge sharing in your company communications, it helps team members think of documentation efforts as helping each other and not just an activity helping the company. This encourages adoption and the continuous cycle of knowledge-sharing work.
Having documentation helps you create a robust onboarding program where new team members can learn about the company, their team members, their department, and their role duties in a supported and self-service way. It eliminates a lot of anxiety and guesswork for the new team members. It also makes onboarding more efficient for the company to get people up to speed and do their role more successfully sooner.
In addition, it relieves a lot of the burden on the new team members’ direct manager to train them one-on-one for every part of their job. If the documentation culture is taught during onboarding, it is also more likely to be adopted and reinforced, as new team members are more likely to learn new habits compared to existing team members.
Risk
What are the potential risks of inadequate documentation?
Risks of having inadequate documentation include:
More errors in the work, which could cause customer or client churn
More re-work time due to errors
More time completing repeated tasks when people recreate the wheel each time
More time doing work due to miscommunication of what needs to be done, and a lack of transparency
Not being able to forecast any reports or results since no processes are predictable or repeatable
Not being able to mitigate risks in repeated work since the previous problems in the processes were not documented
Team members leaving the company due to impossible workloads, too much uncertainty, and a lack of support
Reducing profitability due to the above factors
How can organizations ensure the accuracy and reliability of their documentation?
For accuracy, set up systems of people who are in charge of certain pieces or categories, such as knowledge owners or process owners, as well as documentation approvers if needed. Create an approval process for new documentation or for major edits, document that process, and make it easy for everyone to follow. Also, include user testing of documentation in the creation process. This ensures the first iteration of the documentation is accurate.
For reliability, create automated, recurring tasks for the knowledge or process owners to read through every document in their categories of documentation on a regular basis. Quarterly is a good cadence for a maintenance check.
In addition, having a “last updated” date and “owner” name on the documentation itself can help people trust it is up-to-date and hold people accountable for maintaining it.
How can documentation contribute to regulatory compliance and risk management?
Having and using documentation can help ensure regulatory compliance and manage risks since the team members will be less likely to miss important steps if they are following the documentation instead of remembering how to do a process off the top of their heads.
Risks often result from errors or the uncertainty of the unpredictability of everyone doing things differently. Those causes of risks are reduced if documentation is created, used, and maintained.
As your article on risk management mentioned, identifying risks is an important step. If you have documentation of how the process has been run before, it should also contain context on past methods or errors to avoid, helping to identify risks for the future.
Cost
What are some key factors to consider when budgeting for documentation initiatives?
Time will be the largest part of the budget needed for documentation. Giving people the time to complete the first iteration of necessary documentation, and then allotting time for maintenance and creating documentation of any new processes.
The first draft documentation effort will take longer than the maintenance and expansion of documentation as new processes are created, but don't forget to allot time to maintenance. Otherwise, you’ll have to redo that bigger first draft effort every year or two as processes change and people leave the company, taking their knowledge with them.
When budgeting the time for documentation initiatives, realize that your team members may be conditioned not to make time for any work that isn't billable or directly attributed to revenue. Help them not feel guilty about these habits of the negative company cultures they survived in their past by ensuring that time is reserved and the documentation efforts are rewarded by praise or promotions.
For another part of the budget, at some point, you may want to invest in a knowledge base if your team’s daily “home base” tools don't already include some type of knowledge base capability. You could also choose to invest in special screen-capturing tools if you wish. However, these tools are not usually a huge investment compared to other company-wide tools and are not needed immediately. Remember that tool training and adoption will take additional work and additional time on top of your other efforts. Get the documentation time budgeted and the initiative started first.
How can we justify the investment in documentation to stakeholders?
Sharing the benefits we discussed above would be a good start. Remember that good, company-wide, adopted documentation is uncommon, so many stakeholders may not be familiar with or have experienced these benefits themselves. It can be hard for them to see a company's vision with a good documentation culture, the result of your investment.
This topic is so important that my course I cover it in two different areas: when prioritizing where to start documentation and when overcoming objections to documentation when you’re rolling it out to a larger team beyond yourself.
When considering starting a documentation initiative, start with a test to prove the results of investing in documentation.
Start by documenting:
Something you do or manage
Related to business or department goal
Easy to measure
You’re in charge of measuring; you don’t have to ask another department like IT to have access to the data you need
Task/process repeated often so you can show improvement over time the process is completed
You might not be able to find a task or process that hits all those points but aim for as many as you can.
Once you have the results from your test, you will better be able to prove the value of documentation and justify the investment to other leaders.
When overcoming objections to documentation, think about how you can position the benefits of documentation to make this person achieve what they want. How will it help this person if team members, or the whole company, create and use documentation?
This will depend on that person’s specific business and department goals or personal values, so you can see a list of why documentation is important to different roles or values here.
How can we ensure that the cost of documentation initiatives aligns with the expected benefits?
Though there are more strategic metrics, such as the processes running as expected, an easier start may be tracking the number of errors before and after documentation was introduced and task time before and after documentation, compared to the time it takes to complete the first iteration of the documentation. However, this can be difficult as many companies do not perform accurate time tracking or error tracking to begin with.
Many of the human or cultural benefits of documentation could be hard to assign a cost to unless the company has resources for consultants or well-staffed people operations and business operations teams. This is one of the reasons why documentation is not common at many companies; measuring its benefits is difficult to attribute to merely having documentation. The qualitative results, such as testimonials from team members, are easier to report on.
Return on Investment (ROI)
How can we measure the ROI of our documentation initiatives?
If you set specific goals for your documentation initiatives, that will help you create measurements to calculate the return on the investment. Different companies will have different goals, so it is hard to be specific here.
Similar to any attribution debate, it is difficult to attribute the entire success of a company’s strategic goal to having a documented process and people following documentation. The success may be partially because of documentation but not 100% because of it.
Like all results measurement, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to measure the ROI if you’re not currently tracking that data and you don’t have a baseline for success.
Some knowledge base tools will track the time readers spend on each article, and the number of views per article, which can help identify good articles and articles that need improvement or increased adoption efforts. These can be helpful on the project level but are not really ROI metrics related to most business goals.
Product/software documentation often receives more resources than process documentation since it is customer-facing. More measurements related to customer success and onboarding are usually in place, so more options are available for proving ROI. These efforts can be used as inspiration for process documentation ROI measurement. Good Words had a recent webinar on this topic that can provide more details and a Documentation Impact Calculator.
What are the key metrics or indicators we should use to evaluate the success of our documentation efforts?
This is a difficult question since the metrics would depend on your company's goals and your documentation initiative's goals. Some companies may be focused on reducing errors, some on reducing time spent on the process or time spent training/onboarding, and some on improving the results of the process (such as increased sales), for example. These goals are often tied together and difficult to parse apart.
Since the major investment in documentation is time, time tracking could be a key metric to track regardless of your larger goal. For example, tracking the time to complete the task or process, the time to answer questions about that task, the time to train people on the task, the time from rework after errors are made, and more, before and after documentation is introduced.
Time spent to ramp up team members to do 100 percent of their role activities could be a metric to track, but this could be misleading as it would not measure if they are doing 100 percent of their role accurately.
How can we communicate the ROI of documentation initiatives to stakeholders and decision-makers?
If this documentation initiative, the initiative of creating the first iteration of documentation and putting the systems in place for maintenance, is set up as a project, then communication should be the same as any project—meetings, one-on-one, shared channels such as Slack, emails, inside the project management system, and so on. Communicate about ROI multiple times in multiple formats since people do not all pay attention to the same channel and should not be expected to remember anything they saw or heard once. After the first initiative has ended and you’re in the maintenance phase, keep stakeholders up-to-date on the ROI results, perhaps in any quarterly business reviews or other results-sharing processes the company uses.
Speaking of communication, remember that since documentation is not common at most companies, this is also a change management initiative that will need a similar level and type(s) of communication.
Most people have not seen the benefits of documentation first-hand, so they will need help identifying documentation as a root cause of their pain in order to help prove the ROI.
Getting Started
What stakeholders do you recommend to be involved in a documentation project?
Leaders and managers will need to be involved in each of the company’s teams since they need to give team members time and hold them accountable for this new habit. Leaders also may be documentation approvers, so they will need time to approve their team's documentation. Leaders also may be the subject matter experts for certain processes, so they would need to allott time for handing that knowledge to the creator. As previously discussed, getting leaders onboard to be champions of documentation will also help more team members adopt it.
Generally, someone in an operations type of role or doing operations/project management type of work is a good choice for someone to start the initiative and be the project owner for getting it set up and started, the system design, etc.
If you’re testing this initiative with one team or department first before rolling it out to the rest of the company, that can be a more manageable way to handle the initial documentation setup project before going into the lion’s den of numerous stakeholder management.
Use that same “start small” advice, and collect success data to use to gain buy-in from the leaders and managers of the teams you introduce to documentation next.
How do you determine what to document first?
What you document first depends on your roadblock to starting documentation. Think about it – Why don’t you currently have documentation?
A few common roadblocks include:
Overwhelm
Fear of it not being adopted
Fear of not getting leadership support
For overwhelm, the project owner should start small by documenting a simple task they repeat often. This allows them to test the documentation format a few times as they repeat the process, and start to set up and test the systems involved in creating, managing, and measuring documentation efforts.
For adoption fears, start documenting for a team or role that is most likely to adopt it. For example, if the website developers on your team are currently doing product documentation, they may be the least likely team to resist using process documentation. This will make it easier to test out the documentation efforts and iterate on what you learn about your specific company and teams to better set yourself up for success when expanding your documentation efforts across the company.
For leadership buy-in, as leaders are likely reading this, it may be your peers who you would need to convince that documentation is a worthy effort. Start your documentation efforts with a measurable process that will impact the business goals quickly, so you can provide the success of the documentation initiative and convince them to participate in the initiative once it rolls out company-wide.
If you’d like more information, I have more prioritization advice about where to start here.
What tools or software can assist in creating and managing documentation efficiently?
There are tens, if not hundreds, of choices! I don’t have one go-to recommendation because the best choice depends on what software your business is already using on a daily basis and where your team does its work. The “home base”—where people are already working—is where the documentation should live, or it should be easily accessible to find from there (such as integrating or easily linking the documents).
If you’re looking for more specifics, I created a list of features to consider, as well as a list of potential tools to research.
Reimagining Documentation
I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to Jen Bergren for shedding light on the often-overlooked yet crucial aspects of documentation. Her expertise and willingness to tackle leaders' FAQs have provided valuable insights and guidance.
As we wrap up this interview, I urge all leaders to re-examine their commitment to documentation. Embracing organized and effective documentation practices can streamline processes, enhance collaboration, and pave the way for long-term success. Let’s harness the power of documentation to drive innovation, efficiency, and growth within our organizations.
Thank you, Jen, for inspiring us to take this important step towards excellence.
Thank you so much for asking these great questions and allowing me to share about documentation!