Documentation is an extremely important part of any organizations tech support system. You need to have good documentation on how things work and tie together so that you can efficiently and effectively troubleshoot. But something often overlooked and underutilized is user facing documentation. Should you create a “how to” document for each piece of software or process in your organization? Where to draw the line is a grey area.
This grey area is the middle of a spectrum from waaaay too much -> waaaay too little information provided for your users. It’s important for you to give your users something that they can use as a starting point for software or processes but you will drive yourself crazy if you try to document everything. The loose rules I like to use for if I need to document something for a user are as follows:
Is this going to require more than 5 clicks?
Are more than 25% users going to use this more than once month?
Double the percentage of users that will use this and that’s how certain to be you need a document. I.e. 30% equals 60% certainty and 75% means 150% certainty :wink:
How often do we (the support team) need to help a user with this?
If it’s more than twice a week you should probably have a document for it.
Those super loose rules aside documentation is meant to the user AND to help you have more time to focus on other tasks. Use this XKCD comic as a good metric for time savings but also remember that documentation is also to help users, not just save you time.
