When you buy some kind of electronics, you will always find one thing inside the box along with the device you purchased. It is a user manual. It helps users to learn to operate the device safely. It is a standard for almost all the consumer appliances. It is a piece of vital information that would help you solve problems when you encounter them.
Well designed appliance = useless manual?
A lot of us don’t really pay attention to such a piece of paper (sometimes a booklet). We simply just open the box, turn on the device and push some buttons. Then the device would do what we want them to do. Depending on the design of the device, it could be fairly straightforward and doesn’t take too much effort to know how to operate the device. This leads to a major problem. We no longer believe in the importance of having a documentation.
Documentation is such a vital part of system that would save you so much time and money in different ways. It provides the overview of how the system is designed and how most of the problems could be diagnosed. It is neither a decorative item nor a waste of resources.
Company ABC’s pain
Company ABC runs its operation using an in house application. It has been up and running for 5 years and never really had any major issues. Through the past 5 years, users tend to find workaround to solve problems during their operation and it has been working out until now. Company ABC started searching for consulting help because they recognize that their beloved 5-year-old application has gradually become an obstacle to their business growth. Their business has grown more than 400% in the past 5 years. All the workaround they used to counter issues have slowed them down when dealing with customers. Their operation cost drastically increase because they need more staff to deal with the system. So they finally decided to hire someone who can help them overcome the challenge.
Company ABC hired a new CTO. The new CTO believes that the application needs to be revamped with new technology to catch up with the company’s demand. Not only that, the underlying infrastructure also needs to be upgraded to support the new application. Therefore, they start looking into consulting services who can help them revamp the application.
The revenge of cost down
Company ABC believes this is a small problem and shall not take too much effort to solve it. What they didn’t realize is that no one in the world knows their system entirely. Throughout the 5 years, there were many minor changes done to the system and none of them were documented. Their staff don’t even know everything about the system.
To find out exactly how much work needed to revamp the system and enhance it, Company ABC decided to hire a consulting firm to generate an estimate. After weeks of evaluation, the consulting firm estimated that it would cost at least two million dollars just to fully document and understand the purpose of the entire application. That is a crazy number! A number that even the consulting firm sales manager can not believe.
If company ABC understands the importance of documentation when they first started building their system, If they documented every change they made throughout the 5 years, this would not happen. Having the documentation done right might add additionally 10% of cost to the projects, but it could ensure the continuity of the business. It makes sure that company ABC would be able to hire people to help grow their business without a stunning price tag. In the long run, documentation helps reduce the maintenance cost.
What should a documentation do and why?
A documentation should at least record a few pieces of vital information: The scope of the project, the date, the design principle, the design diagrams, requirement list. If possible, adding more technical documentation such as database schema, user diagram, object diagrams, business flow charts would be very valuable.
With the said documentation, this would ensure that any help company ABC hires would be able to quickly understand the situation and thus spend less time and money to get ready for the work. Thus, as their business grows and more demand to meet, they can ensure that their business growth will not be hindered because of the system limitation.
Now you have learned the importance and benefit of having documentation, it might be a good idea to check back with your service provider about the documentation. If you don’t have one, you might want to consider preparing one before your business grows too much. If you have one, be sure to review it and keep it up to date.
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