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Good Documentation is Crucial

For a customer who buys your application or product their first line of support will be the user manual or instructional manual that comes with your application. With user training, users can only achieve between 50% and 70% recall of what had been taught. Recall for difficult technical courses could even be as low as 25% and that quickly diminishes in the days that follow.

New employees joining your company will need to know how the company operates. They need to understand the business processes and procedures in order to perform their tasks efficiently.

When a company's documents and manuals are not well documented would adversely affect the company's image and efficiency. An important fact is that a well documented application, product or processes isn't just about being detailed.

As a consumer, I once bought a home entertainment system which cost me quite a fair bit of money. I was happy with what I bought mainly because it was of a reputable brand. However, that soon turned into an unpleasant experience. It was not because the product was defective but because the user manual was poorly documented. I could not program the system even though I had followed the instructions precisely. I never bought another product of that brand again.

Over the years, I had seen many business and operational documents explaining in great detail the importance of their procedures. However, most offered very minimal instructions on how an employee is to perform those procedures or how to perform them efficiently. Employees need to shuffle between 5 and10 pages of a document in order to obtain the information they needed to perform an unfamiliar task. This is made worse when they need to refer between chapters or sections within the document.

A poorly documented document will result in the loss of customers, customer confidence and loyalty. Employees could be misinformed and become less productive and result in giving customers wrong information which would cause anger and dissatisfaction.

Companies should not take documentation lightly or forego cost for quality. Quality is always from the perspective of the reader. It is not what you perceived but what is perceived by the reader that is important. Investing in good documentation should never be too high a price to pay.
 

About The Author Lo Wai Munn is a trainer, a technical writer and web content professional with more than a 15 years of experience. He has authored several manuals for international distribution and process documents for multinational companies. He was a recipient of a Letter of Commendation from the Ministry of Education, Singapore, for his involvement in training and user manual development.

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