Wake Up From a Documentation Nightmare!

In IT, there is a high cost to an organization with trapped or inaccessible information. IT workers spend a significant amount of time each week dealing with a variety of challenges around poor documentation of this information. The reality is that TIME = MONEY, and that money is being lost directly from your bottom line as a result of the time waste. Take a twist and awaken the fun in your documentation again!

What are the documentation challenges that your team faces?

• Searching for documents and not being able to locate them.
• Recreating documents that can’t be found
• Version control issues around documents
• Consolidating all of the information into one document
• Moving from paper documentation to electronic records
• Storing sensitive documentation (e.g. passwords)

What does this mean in terms of wasted time?

For a business owner it is alarming what these challenges can mean in terms of lost time and productivity. Research has shown that workers may spend;

• Nearly 7 hours a week gathering information
• Nearly 6 hours a week reviewing documents
• Nearly 5 hours a week searching for documents
• Nearly 4 hours a week organizing documents

It is widely accepted that over 20% of your company’s productivity will be lost due to poor documentation.

The inability to locate and retrieve information effects your ability to serve customer needs, make quality decisions and maximize sales opportunities.

So how much is poor documentation costing you?

Here at IT Glue™ we thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to build a tool to provide some insight into the true cost of poor documentation for an organization.

Our Cost of Waste Calculator will allow you to get an idea of the cost and also opportunity cost to your business.

COST OF WASTE CALCULATOR

Our calculator will help you determine the costs you create from time wasted and process inefficiency in your business. Give it a try!

So what then can I do to improve my documentation?

Your team need tools and best practices that make them more productive by;

• Creating and managing documents
• Allowing for collaboration around documents
• Working with documents on mobile devices

Any solution that makes documentation easier to access will save time and money, whilst helping your team work smarter and more efficiently. These are a few solutions that we feel  can dramatically improve your documentation process.

• Dropbox, Google Drive and Hackpad are places to store customer information and site specific information
• Your PSA e.g. Autotask and ConnectWise or RMM e.g. Kaseya, Labtech, N-able and MaxFocus provide a repository for all the configuration detail of customer assets
• Lucid Chart is excellent for housing network diagrams
• SweetProcess is designed specifically for Standard Operating Procedures (SOP). Workflowy and Process Street are also a good option for creating an SOP around checklists. For a great article on all the tools on the market check out this great Zapier post
• IT Glue allows you to pull in the information from all of these sources above, and has the advantage of allowing you to store standard operating procedures for all your processes

It is worth bearing in mind that if you have too many separate solutions, you force your team to be the “Glue” between systems. Whatever systems you choose to work with, it’s critical to think about the ways you will get your team to start working towards building out your business documentation. For more ideas on how to get your team to document take at look at our recent blog post.