Best Practices for Storing and Maintaining Your Documentation

There are many best practices around storing and maintaining your documentation that are talked about a lot in the Information Management world today. While there are a lot of best practices out there, I am sharing a “cheat sheet” with you here of the practices that I believe make the most sense.

These best practices are common sense but not common practice. Best practices in storing and maintaining and in the broader Information Management context are not followed without deliberate effort. Although you don’t always need a ton of money or resources, you need thoughtful planning and design to execute these practices effectively.

Information should be shareable.

Information is made to be shared. Yes, there is some information marked Private and Confidential, but most information should be shared across your organization. Organizations needs systems and practices to ensure that information is easily shared and accessible across the organization. It sounds very easy but in reality, it is not.

This is not just a fluffy concept.

• Sharing information stops the proliferation of duplicate projects and initiatives.
• Sharing information is about making money off your information.
• Sharing information makes communications and teamwork more profound and more meaningful.

 How do you do this?

• Create better documents. Ok, so I have said this many times in my blogs, but stronger quality documents are better to be shared. You aren’t going to circulate a bunch of crappy notes you took on a napkin. Use the tips in this book to create great documents.
• Use better tools. Your tools will help you to share, usually but not always. SharePoint sites or Dropbox or other tools are great at improving the ability to share. Emailing documents back and forth is not ideal.
• Make a conscious effort to share your work.

Store once, use many times, and build your workflow around your documents.

This is a brilliant concept for your documentation practices that comes from the Information Management world. This practice reduces duplication in an organization and makes the management of your documents a heck of a lot easier, while it does take some time to implement.

But this practice is never used without a very conscious effort. It won’t just happen on its own.

Here is a simple example. Many of us email documents, sometimes many documents, back and forth to team members to get them reviewed. This email process increases the amount of documents and increases the risk of one of your team members using the wrong document. The risk goes up as the number of documents going back and forth increases.

First level of solution: instead of emailing, email a link to the folder. This is an improvement to the review cycle. Emailing a link to the folder helps to ensure team members are using the right document.

Now, let’s get to the second level of solution: taking this example to the next level, you could improve the document sharing by storing the document in SharePoint. SharePoint is one level above from file sharing as it has better ability to share the document and track version control.

Now, let’s take this example to the third level: instead of emailing the document, you build a workflow around the document review in SharePoint. This would “force” the document to go through the various levels of approval. You wouldn’t do this for a document that is one-off but you may for a series of routine documents such as Purchase Orders, Personnel Records, approvals of Expense Reports, or even policies or processes going through levels of review. The point of all this is that the document only lives in one place, but the workflow is forcing the document to go to other people for review.

Some companies are finding this so effective that they are taking away the file shares of their staff and forcing them to use tools like SharePoint. This avoids duplication of documents and documents living in areas that they shouldn’t.

Single-Source Publishing

Single-source publishing is a very similar term. It allows the same type of content to be used across different forms of media, more than one time. Therefore, whoever is updating the documentation only needs to do the work once. The source document can then be stored in one place and reused. This reduces the potential for error, as corrections are only made one time in the source document.

Separate your work-in-progress documents from your old or archived documents.

Over time (most) organizations end up with a mismatch of partially-started, half-done, old and even outdated projects and related documents all lumped into the same folder structure as their current documents—with no way of separating them. In addition to lost time and money, this mistake causes organizations increased confusion over the years—especially as the organization continues to grow and become more complex, and as the volume of projects and documents increases.

Through separating your works-in-progress from your archived documents (either through simple folder structure or through effective metadata), your team will discover the following benefits in the near if not immediate future:

• Quick views into the status of projects in progress.
• Clarity in understanding which projects are closed and the final documents delivered to clients or other stakeholders.
• A more formalized project close-out process, where documents must be transferred to the archived/closed project folder.
• More effective reference material through clearly marking the finalized/closed projects and documents.
• Cheaper IT or physical storage. Archived information is typically cheaper to maintain than documents sitting in your more precious work-in-progress space. Think about paper documents. You wouldn’t use up your valuable downtown office space to store rooms full of paper records. I remember this practice vividly from working at TD Bank in the 1990s—boxes of documents being shipped out of the expensive downtown King and Bay Toronto real estate out to storage in the suburbs.

This is the same concept that professional organizers will apply if they are coming to organize your office. Paper documents, folders, etc., that you are actively working on and reference frequently should be close to your desk for reference. However, files like tax files from five years ago and manuals or warranties that you are likely never to reference but are keeping just in case should be moved out of your valuable work space. If you are like me, you need to stay on top of this to avoid getting buried by past projects.

It is better not to have an Information Policy than to have one that no one follows.

I have heard this statement so many times at conferences and in the Information Management community that I need to repeat it here. It might be a flavour of the day, but I think that there are some fundamental truths behind what is being said here. The statement stems from frustration from the Information Management community with policies not being followed.

Information Management policies are a reasonably new concept. Here are a few core concepts in Information Management policies:

Policies might set high-level guidance around Information Management. This might be that information needs to be protected, not go outside the company, ensure Confidentiality and Privacy. Most people get these things and the concept of the information belonging to the company is really not new and people have been signing off on this in their Codes of Conducts for a very long time.

Policies and procedures are now moving to dictate more stringent requirements:

• How documents should be designed—this could be in the form of a governing-documents hierarchy that lists what constitutes a policy, procedure, or standard.
• Where documents should be kept—some companies are even removing their people’s shared drives in order to make this work. They are dictating the systems and repositories to be kept.
• How we should tag documents—this includes metadata.
• How to format documents.
• How to name documents.

It is a struggle for people and organizations to change their culture regarding policies to enforce effective information management and governance practices.

Documentation is a very personal practice. Professionals and teams grow their own culture around their documentation. Professionals are trained in different ways of seeing, interpreting and creating documents. Organization-wide policies are therefore extremely difficult to implement without resistance. I too have been guilty of literally hating the policies and standards dictated by the Information Management team when I needed to apply these rules to a particular area of the company for a client I am working with. But patience and consistency will pay off massively in the long-run when it comes to ensuring that your documentation practices remain effective.

I hope that you enjoyed this simple cheat sheet of best practices! To continue this engaging discussion on documentation best practices, contact me at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you and helping you in the future.