IT Documentation Basics for Busy Technical Teams
A lack of comprehensive, organized IT documentation slows technical teams down and creates bottlenecks around business-critical development projects and maintenance. At best, teams that don’t effectively document IT processes struggle to locate the information they’re looking for in disorganized or siloed systems, limiting everyday productivity. At worst, teams that don’t have reliable documentation about their systems have to start from scratch when they need to make updates or changes, wasting valuable time that’s better spent building something new.
In this article, we’ll highlight why businesses need IT documentation and walk you through how to create IT documentation that’s useful and accessible for the whole team.
Why IT Documentation is Important for Your Business
Creating comprehensive IT documentation takes time and effort. But prioritizing documentation is well worth the investment because it increases efficiency and strengthens development down the road.
Forty-four percent of IT team members report feeling frustrated about the level of information accessibility in their organization. Meanwhile, 21% of employees say that not having the right tools to find the information they need impacts the quality and speed of their work. Detailed, searchable documentation empowers teams to work smarter and enables them to focus on the high-value tasks at hand. Here’s how documentation benefits IT teams and businesses:
Streamlining Knowledge Management
Knowledge management is the process of creating, organizing, and sharing internal knowledge about a company’s product and operational processes throughout the organization. Documentation captures the knowledge that the technical team has in one place and makes it easy for everyone to access it. As businesses scale and add new team members, having thorough documentation that they can turn to speeds up onboarding and helps them do their jobs more effectively.
Improving Communication and Productivity
Team members can access IT documentation on their own time and get answers to their questions as soon as they need them, minimizing the need for meetings and encouraging autonomy. Great documentation gives team members insight into what’s already been done and how it was done so that they can hit the ground running when they need to make updates or check for outdated systems.
Enabling Collaboration and Delegation
Recording IT processes makes it easier to collaborate with external teams like managed service providers (MSPs). With IT documentation, MSPs can get up to speed with how your systems were built, and how they operate. This can help MSPs set up integrations that work with what you already have and monitor your environment effectively. MSPs can also contribute to your documentation as they provide updates and troubleshoot issues so that you can preserve that knowledge for your own team or future MSP collaborators.
Protecting Operational Continuity
Documentation keeps valuable technical knowledge within your business even if your best team members move on from your organization. It ensures that quality standards and best practices are upheld as your company grows and your product or tech stack evolves. With documentation on hand, team members can also find out how to remediate common issues faster, reducing expensive downtime.
IT Documentation Best Practices
1) Make a Plan and Establish Roles and Responsibilities
Don’t start generating documentation without having a clear plan for orchestrating the creation process within your team. Scope out the initial documentation setup project and determine who will be responsible for writing docs and approving them going forward.
2) Set Up a Single Source of Truth That’s Easy to Navigate
Unify all your IT documentation in one platform. Come up with a logical structure for grouping topics or folders that makes finding and adding information as easy as possible.
3) Use Templates and Formatting Guidelines
Create templates and develop a standardized format for all team members to follow when they write so that everyone knows what information they need to include in documentation. Take a multimedia approach and encourage team members to include video, diagrams, and screenshots in docs to illustrate details.
4) Integrate Documentation into Your Team’s Workflow
Cultivate a culture of documentation by integrating writing into the IT team’s existing workflow and encourage people to write together to create more comprehensive docs. Treat writing docs as a part of making updates or resolving issues. Ensure that documentation writing is baked into the project scope when your team is:
Implementing new software systems
Making updates to existing infrastructure
Resolving IT issues or customer support tickets
Addressing a security breach or incident
Troubleshooting new or recurring IT problems
5) Review Documentation on a Regular Basis
Establish a process for regularly reviewing documentation and flagging outdated information to make sure it stays relevant and useful. Using a documentation platform with a version control system (VCS) makes it easy to revert to past versions when your team needs to see how things worked before an update—for example, when they need to troubleshoot a new bug introduced by a recent deployment.
What to Look for in IT Documentation Software
The easier it is for team members to use IT documentation software, the more likely they are to maintain high-quality docs and incorporate them into their daily routines. User-friendliness should be top-of-mind when selecting a solution. Here are a few key features your IT documentation solution needs to have:
Content creation tools. Pre-loaded and customizable templates simplify and standardize the writing process. Choose a solution that provides a built-in structure for all the types of documentation you need to create, such as quick-start guides, tutorials, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and FAQs.
Version control and track changes. It should be easy to access past versions of every page and see who made which changes and when they made them.
Review, approvals, and auditing workflows. Many tools provide checklists or approval workflows that prevent team members from publishing updates until their content has been reviewed for quality and accuracy.
Intuitive internal search engine. These days, we all expect the experience of looking for information in digital solutions to be just like using a search engine or generative AI. Look for IT documentation software that has advanced AI-powered search to seamlessly surface the information users are looking for.
Integration with other systems. Leading IT documentation software integrates with customer-facing solutions like helpdesk, chatbot, and learning management systems (LMS), communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, as well as endpoint and device management software.
Start Streamlining and Documenting Your IT Processes
Partnering with an MSP allows busy teams to strengthen IT operations by delegating time-consuming tasks like monitoring, maintenance, and troubleshooting. MSPs that also offer IT professional services can guide the implementation of new IT processes, including documentation, to ensure teams have the frameworks and workflows in place to succeed.
Looking for a reliable IT partner? IX Solutions can help you build and scale your IT management processes, preserving knowledge your team can use to continuously improve. Learn more about our IT Managed Services >