Using Checklists to Improve Your Documentation
BY IT GLUE | July 24, 2018
At IT Glue, we 💜 documentation. But not everybody does, even the people who understand its value. So after you’ve onboarded IT Glue, you still to have to get your time to buy in and start documenting. Our new Checklists feature can help with that.
The first checklist you’ll want to create is one that outlines the overarching steps to achieving complete documentation.
It is recommended that each organization has a team member assigned to it. This places responsibility for documenting that organization’s environment on one key person, creating a level of responsibility and transparency that will encourage results.
For each organization, you’ll then want to create a checklist of tasks for the key person to execute. These tasks will probably vary from one organization to the next, unless you specialize in just one single vertical. The basic starting point for the checklist will probably be from the MSP Information Hierarchy, and follow the different asset types in IT Glue:
And so on. Make this a template so that you can use this for any organization that you want to onboard (or improve documentation for).
The final step might be to create a checklist for the company relating to API projects. Start with ones that are already out there, such as Office 365 tenant info, but then identify where you might achieve substantial gains in developing your own integrations, and task the appropriate member of your team with the project. Obviously, start with the projects that will yield efficiency gains across the largest number of organizations.
The final checklist will be the review checklist. This will be a periodic checklist, every six months maybe, for each organization’s documentation to be reviewed. We recommend that this is done by somebody other than the person who did the documentation in the first place, because two sets of eyes are better than one.
Using the Checklists feature to guide your documentation process will ensure that no steps are missed, and that you have full visibility as to your team’s progress, allowing you to manage your documentation in a more active way than was possible before, and more easily, too.
IT Glue is a documentation platform aimed at IT professionals. Information is imported from PSA, RMM and other tools into IT Glue, where it is organized for ease of access. Document both hardware and software using automated processes to reduce the time it takes to onboard new clients. LucidChart and Word integrations help you document processes and documents as well. With relationship mapping and a robust search, your team will reduce the amount of time they waste looking for information by 50% or more.
