Documentation is one of those things that can feel perfectly adequate for years.
People know the environment. The team has been together for a while. If somebody needs to understand why something was configured a certain way, there’s usually someone around who remembers.
Then something changes.
A key person leaves, you start a major new project, or there’s an incident and suddenly you need information quickly. That’s when you find out how much of the environment exists in people’s heads.
Think about a project for example, where everyone assumed the documentation was in reasonable shape. Then you start looking for something specific and discover that the information you need is spread across several places, or the document you’ve found describes an environment that’s moved on considerably since it was written.
You can usually work around that when there’s no urgency.
But during an incident, it feels very different.
If you’re trying to restore a service or understand how systems depend on each other, you don’t want to spend the first hour working out whether the information in front of you can be trusted.
Good documentation gives you somewhere reliable to start.
Getting it to that point takes more than writing everything down once. The environment keeps changing, so the documentation needs attention as part of the normal work around those changes.
And that’s where things become difficult.
Updating a document after a project can wait until tomorrow. A small configuration change doesn’t always feel significant enough to record immediately. When the team’s already busy, keeping everything current competes with work that has a pressing deadline.
Eventually, enough small gaps appear that people start relying on memory again.
Creating the time to keep documentation useful can make a big difference to how confidently the team can deal with change and respond when something goes wrong.
Co-managed support can provide extra operational capacity around your internal team, leaving more room for work like this to be done properly rather than squeezed into whatever time happens to be left (which is usually not a lot).
If documentation is one of those jobs you know deserves more attention, perhaps we should have a chat about creating the capacity for it. Get in touch.