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Why worry about documentation

• the number of features or functions that are not completely intuitive, plus
• the number of failure modes that can result from user misoperation.

The numbers get big quickly. Unless your product is very simple and reliable, and is sold to very few customers, you're going to need documentation to support it.  Without documentation, your users are going to keep your costly helpdesk personnel extremely busy.

Simple paper-based documentation can divert many of the help calls you're likely to receive, but there are many other options. Effective online help systems can integrate into your software products to completely replace the need for Tier 1 support.

Documentation offers many other advantages as well. One key advantage is credibility. Customers expect significant documentation when they buy almost any technology product. A product offered without any documentation is perceived to be cheap, low quality, and untrustworthy. Documentation provides instant credibility, increasing the perceived quality and value of your product.

Documentation provides that credibility even before the sale. Printed documentation can become powerful marketing collateral, giving prospective customers a tangible, credible demonstration of your product's key selling points.  

Another advantage of documentation is reduced training cost. Unless your business model relies on the sales of training, you want to reduce training overheads as much as possible.

Documentation reduces training costs in two ways: by enabling users to perform tasks without prior training, and by supporting the training process itself.

Documentation can be designed to support leader-led or self-paced training, and can also be set up to allow the creation of online help and other information products from a single source. This minimizes your costs and content overheads.  

A final benefit of documentation is the option to provide documentation fixes instead of performing recoding or redesign on your product. Documentation can be used as a short-term fix for problems with interface usability or workflow, reducing the impact of software or service faults and allowing you to defer or avoid the costs of overhauling or patching your product.

Services and solutions

The arguments made for the documentation of hardware and software also apply to technological services that you are selling. Documentation helps minimize your running costs by reducing the reliance on your helpdesk for support, by reducing your training costs, by proving the credibility of your offering, and by giving you the option of using documentation fixes to work around perceived service problems.

For simple services, documentation may take the form of a splash screen, brochure, or quick reference card. For more complex services and solutions, you may choose to provide online help, user guides, OAMP (Operation, Administration, Maintenance and Provisioning) guides, sales guides, and installation guides.  

Process engineering

If you are developing processes, you need documentation for several reasons: 

Process documentation takes the form of process descriptions, process maps, job aids, and quick references.  

Our process documentation solutions are scaleable.  Large process engineering efforts may involve a full suite of process documents, management guides, process maps, meeting logs and memoranda, rationalizations and job aids.  Smaller efforts may require only a simple map and a set of job aids for performers.

Need more information?

If you have more questions, or would like to find out what we can do to help you develop your documentation, please contact us.