IT Documentation: What is it & How to do it Right?

• Editorial Team
• 5 years ago
• 08 Comments

Employees form the foundation of any successful organization. It's their collective hard work, expertise, skill, and years of experience that allow them to work in tandem and lead the company towards success.

What if your most experienced software developer or IT sales rep retires? What if they move to a different company? What if they go on a long vacation? They are going to take their skills, experience, and knowledge with them. Once they leave, you would have to start your work from scratch: training and onboarding new employees and getting them up to speed with the rest of the organization.

Not only will this process waste a tremendous amount of time and effort on your end, but it is also bound to cost your business a fortune in training and onboarding costs alone. The cost of hiring and training a new employee also involves the cost of paperwork, loss of productivity for all parties involved in the hiring and training process, cost of premature turnover, and more.

What is IT Documentation?

Documentation is a critical part of any organization, especially those that focus primarily on IT. IT Documentation is a detailed description of how to execute a process, method, task, or program and outlines the exact steps needed to do it efficiently.

Documentation works as a guide for internal (employees, management, etc.) as well as external (customers, clients, partners) stakeholders, helping them understand a process easily and getting them up to speed without the requirement of proper training.

In the IT and software industry, documentation is used for a variety of purposes:

• Gathering requirements for software development
• Documenting the steps involved for future reference
• Creating project proposals and SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures)
• Creating training manuals to train new employees quickly
• As a contract between the customer and the client
• As a self-service customer manual for software usage and troubleshooting
• To think through the entire process before committing costly resources
• Documenting the source code and other key technologies

At its core, IT documentation is the proper organization of information to help teams do their job more efficiently and subsequently, be more productive.

Why IT Documentation is Important?

There are many reasons why businesses should take IT documentation seriously and do it often. Here are the key benefits:

1. To preserve organizational knowledge

When your star employee moves on to another company or retires, their job experience is lost, leaving a gaping hole in your workflow. This is why it's important for organizations to document the experience and technical know-how of senior managers so that the knowledge of the organization does not leave when the employee leaves.

2. Save time and effort

If you don't have proper IT documentation in place, employees are going to carry out the task in different ways. While some may do the job quickly, others are likely going to waste time and effort figuring stuff out from scratch. Having clear and concise documentation ensures all employees carry out the same task in a set period of time.

3. Training for new employees

Since documentation preserves the experience of current employees, it acts as a valuable resource for new hires. When a new hire joins the company, training them becomes immensely easy as they can simply go through the documentation and educate themselves on different business processes, policies, and overall workings of the organization.

4. Fewer errors

With clear documentation, everyone knows exactly what to do and what outcome to expect. This reduces the chances of making errors while working significantly and keeps everyone accountable.

5. Increased efficiency

When documentation is in place, searching for information becomes streamlined and quick. Thus, less time is wasted in shoulder-tapping and asking for help, as employees can quickly refer to the existing documentation and solve their queries. This removes redundancy in the system and avoids unnecessary communication related to routine tasks.

The Best IT Documentation Tool: Bit.ai

Now that you know what IT documentation is and why it's crucial to have documentation in place for smooth business workflow, it's time to find you the perfect documentation tool on the market right now.

Ask yourself this: "What does my ideal documentation tool look like?"

We bet your ideal tool has the following features:

• Easy to use with amazing user interface
• Cost-effective and easy on the pocket
• Clean editor that supports fast documentation
• Centralized place to store all documentation
• Real-time collaboration capabilities

Well, guess what? Today we are going to introduce you to a tool that has all the above features and more. Enter, Bit.ai!

Bit.ai is new-age software documentation and knowledge management tool that helps employees collaborate, share, track, and manage all company documentation in one place.

Key Features of Bit.ai:

We think we have made a pretty solid case here. There's nothing like Bit out there that does it all—from document creation and collaboration to document sharing, managing, and tracking. With a free account for up to 5 members, there's no reason why you should not give Bit a try and feel its awesomeness yourself!

Over to You!

In today's fast-paced world, productivity is key. Every business wants to get ahead by doing work swiftly and efficiently, using minimum resources, and maintaining top-notch quality.

Documentation thus becomes a driver of success for any organization as it preserves company knowledge, trains new employees, and reduces the ambiguity of operations. A great documentation tool like Bit can help you do just that, and more.