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10 Tips for Improving Your Documentation Immediately

Read these 10 tips to gain simple techniques for improving your

documentation quality, practices and skills – immediately!

Tip 1 – Write Better Notes after Your Meetings The ability to create effective meeting notes is one of the most important skills for mastering

documentation. Meeting notes are fundamental to maintaining a culture of accountability.

Without them, you cannot capture intellectual property within your department or drive

momentum in your projects, operations or sales results.

If your organization does not have a practice of taking meeting notes, then your meetings are

no more than information sharing, or even whining and gossiping sessions. Your meetings

may have interesting discussions but, without effective notes and a follow-up process, the

issues and challenges are likely repeated over the life of the project or team.

If your organization does take meeting notes but does not use them, then you need to educate

your employees on how to create effective meeting notes and how to use them.

Here are some ideas for improving the documentation quality from your meetings and your

meetings overall:

Have a Clear Purpose to Your Meeting This might sound like an obvious tip to you, but sadly many professionals – if not most –

conduct meetings without putting enough thought into what exactly they need to get out of

them. The person responsible for taking your meeting notes must understand what issues he

or she needs to listen for and clarify with attendees.

Your meeting purpose must be as clear and focused as possible. “Making a decision about

whether to buy ABC software.” “Planning the action items for XYZ proposal for March.”

“Defining the key messages for the monthly project communication to management.”

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Put a Value on Your Meeting This step reinforces the need to treat the time of your employees, consultants and your

organization overall as valuable. Assign a rate for all attendees; say $100 per hour. Then

calculate the amount it would cost you to run this meeting using the assigned rates for all

attendees. If you needed a business case to hold this meeting, would the meeting really be

worth the price you calculated? If not, then consider whether the meeting is really necessary

or whether you need all attendees to be present.

Do Not, Repeat, Do Not Regurgitate What was Said in the Meeting This is the most common and most serious mistake when it comes to writing meeting notes.

Notes are not intended as a dumping ground for everything that everyone said; they structure

unstructured information. You must closely examine the information and then strategically

structure it into logical headings, emphasizing the important points and removing useless

information.

Practice Active Listening Listening skills are essential for creating effective meeting notes. Practice active listening

through asking attendees to clarify the most important points from the meeting (before they

leave from it), and the decisions they made during the meeting or decided to delay to a future

date.

Label Action Items and Decisions The primary purpose of your meetings should be to drive actions and decisions. You need to

clearly label all action items and decisions (“Action Item1:”, and “Decision Needed:”). You

also need to assign clear owners accountable for these actions and decisions. Although action

items may be clear, the specific decisions required to act upon them are generally murkier

because team members are often reluctant to make strong decisions. (Ask for suggestions

rather than definitive answers if decisions aren’t forthcoming.) Meeting notes will power

more accountability into your decision-

making process.

Make Them Readable and Engaging Treat meeting notes like a critical

document that you will reference over the

life of your project or team. Apply best

practices of technical writing to ensure that

your notes clearly communicate to your

audience. Don’t be afraid to use tables,

simple graphs, pictures and bullets to make

your notes visually appealing.

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Tip 2 – Cut Down your Use of the Passive Voice The passive voice is a plague on effective documentation. It reduces its clarity,

consistency, and the efficiency and tightness of the writing. The passive voice is writing in

which the subject of the sentence denotes the recipient of the action rather than the

performer. For example, “the server was installed” represents the passive voice while “the

technician installed the server” represents the active voice. The passive voice is an easier,

sloppier way of writing.

Yes, there are some instances when you need to use the passive voice in your writing.

These uses consist mainly of: (1) when the actor is unknown or irrelevant (2) when you are

talking about a general truth or (3) when you want to emphasize the person or thing acted on.

But – excessive use of the passive voice is detrimental to documentation, especially to

process-related documents where it is essential to understand which people or systems are

performing the actions. The good news is that this is easy to fix. Under your Grammar

function in Microsoft Word, you can click on the “Passive Sentences” option and Word will

automatically check for passive sentences for you.

Tip 3 – Quit it with the Buzz Words and Acronyms Buzz words – often confusing “insider” terminology and jargon – are continually

bombarding the business landscape. They tantalize professionals and executives with the

promise of new solutions to old problems. “Knowledge Management”, “Organizational

Effectiveness”, “Business Process Reengineering”, “Optimization”, “Organizational

Alignment” – there is constant stream of new “words of the month”. Organizations chase the

latest buzz word with hopes that it will be the silver bullet to solve their problems. It seldom

does. And the cycle continues as they chase the

next buzz word, next month.

Put your money where your mouth is. Reciting

the latest colloquialism may create the

impression that you’re “in the know”, but you

need to be able to take the next step.

Professionals have to do more than just talk

about information to be successful. You must

use effective documentation to capture

pertinent, practical information and turn it into

something that brings real tangible value to

your organization.

So, quit using fancy buzz words and confusing

acronyms – and enhance the clarity and

credibility of your documentation.

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Tip 4 – Use Punchy Titles, Bullets and Key Points Your audience wants to exert as little energy as possible when reading your work.

They’ll just “skim” your document looking for the key points. So, make things easy for

them. Headers, bullets and key points, often combined with effective visuals, are as

important as the text. Some readers only read headers and bullets, and might even make a

decision about your work based on reading only the Table of Contents.

When assessing your document, it’s helpful to communicate the entire gist of your work

within the headers, bullets and key points alone. Be sure to bold or highlight the key

messages in your document so that your reader doesn’t have to go looking for them.

Test out this technique with a co-worker. Can your reader understand your key messages

through the headers, bullets, table of contents, and the bolded points alone? If they can

understand most of what you are saying, then you have succeeded in making your document

clear and easy to read. If not, invent more descriptive titles and bolded points and then try the

test again.

Tip 5 – Take More Pictures and Videos Why are Facebook and Instagram so popular? Because we all love pictures! Use

pictures as much as you can in your documentation to break up your text and add life to your

documents. Pictures or even videos off your phone are one of the easiest, most immediate

ways of enhancing the quality of your documentation with minimal effort.

Since we all carry cameras, picture documentation is and will continue to increase

dramatically and will become increasingly accepted and normal for the next generation,

accustomed to using photos more than paper or written text. Video documentation will also

expand. While videos are used extensively for training, there is no reason why the application

doesn’t expand to other applications including for audit documentation and recording

meetings. The generation entering the workforce grew up video recording on a daily basis –

the use of video will become a more normal part of corporate documentation too.

So, what are some ideas for incorporating more pictures into your documentation?

For training materials, be sure to include screenshots or videos of how the system works

or how to perform a task.

Take photos of the whiteboard in your meetings and add them to your documentation.

Take photos of the team/attendees in your meetings or especially at key sessions and add

them to your meeting notes.

When discussing parts of documents, use snipping tools wherever possible to highlight

key messages or locations in documentations.

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Tip 6 – Create and Add Simple Diagrams to Your Documents Take advantage of the many canned shapes and Smart Art in Microsoft Word to engage your

audience – these simple shapes will help you to break up blocks of text to make your

documents more readable for your users. The shapes in Word are easy to add and, with

practice, you will learn how to insert shapes to create a great colour scheme quickly.

Use simple graphs to communicate number values – strings of large numbers are not fun to

look at ad will lose your reader quickly. Communicating numbers using simple graphs will

help you to communicate them faster and more effectively. Microsoft Word 2013 and Excel

2013 offer easy wizards to create graphs in a matter of seconds.

Which one of the following is easier to read? Which can you read faster?

Company Sales

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4

Calgary 6 7 8 9

Vancouver 11 20 31 37

Tip 7 – Use the Reperformance Standard One of the key challenges that organizations

face in developing and maintaining excellent

documentation is that they do not have a

consistent standard to measure against. In

reality, there are many different types of and

uses for documents and using one consistent

standard is difficult. There is, however, one

standard that provides a strong metric for most

corporate documentation: the “reperformance

standard”. This standard requires that the

standalone document enables a user to perform

the related task or process again.

The reperformance standard is commonly

known to assurance and audit professionals

who use it to ensure that test procedures can be

reperformed in the event that results are

challenged in litigation proceedings. The

0

10

20

30

40

50

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4

Vancouver

Calgary

Company Sales

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standard is, however, grossly under used. The reperformance standard should be used across

organizations and expanded to many different applications, including:

• Training Materials:

Can the user perform his or her job using the documentation? Is it easy for a new

employee to get up to speed?

• User Manuals:

Does the user understand the application or system? Does the documentation enable

employees to use the system effectively?

• Process Documentation:

Can the user perform the process following the documentation? Does it describe the

process in enough detail?

• Disaster Recovery Documentation:

Does the user know what to do in the case of a disaster? Does the documentation

enable the user to carry out the steps successfully in the case of an emergency?

• Safety Documentation:

Can the user understand the process clearly enough to prevent an incident? Can the

user reperform all safety procedures?

• Marketing Documentation:

Can the sales team deliver a consistent message to clients? Can the sales team find

materials easily to execute on opportunities quickly?

The Clarity Standard For documentation that is designed to inform rather than train, the reperformance standard

may not be as applicable. Informational documentation can be tested using the clarity

standard to ascertain understanding of the document rather than for reperformance.

Test your documentation using the clarity standard by asking:

Does your reader understand what the documenter is trying to

communicate?

Are there any gaps in the reader’s understanding?

Does the reader understand the message easily?

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Tip 8 – Test your Documentation for Clarity and

Engagement Effective technical writing is key to ensuring that your documentation is usable and meets the

reperformance standard. Effective documentation shares the same fundamentals as corporate

communications, demanding conscious effort to get the message across to readers.

Unfortunately, most documenters make the common – and inexcusable – assumption that no

one is actually going to read their document.

Why bother documenting if no one is going to read it anyway? Don’t you have something

better to do? You have probably been out of school for some time and are therefore caught

up in the grind of work. With so many documents and emails being exchanged, it is easy to

become complacent about writing skills.

There are many rules of grammar and you are recommended to consult other sources if you

are interested in brushing up. However, before you spend tons of energy reading up on the

rules of Technical Writing, it is important to note that there are two key concepts when it

comes to improving your Technical Writing: (1) Clarity and (2) Engagement.

CLARITY: Your reader must be able to understand your

document’s points easily and immediately. Make

every word and visual aid have a function, and leave

out unnecessary elaboration. Business writing is

practical – you aren’t writing poetry or a thriller novel.

ENGAGEMENT: Your reader must want to read your document. Writing

must be engaging in order to be successful. You need

to convey conviction in order to drive momentum: you

are speaking from the voice of the expert.

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Tip 9 – Separate Your Archived Documents from Work in

Progress Looking for a quick win for improving your team’s document management practices or even

your personal documentation? Try this simple tip: separate your archived (aka closed, “done”

work) from your work in progress documents.

Although most teams or organizations don’t set out to make this mistake, over time many (if

not most) end up with a mismatch partially-started, half-done, old and even outdated projects

all lumped into the same folder structure with no way of differentiating them.

In addition to lost time and money, this mistake causes organizations increased confusion

over the years – especially as the organization continues to grow and become more complex

and as the volume of projects and documents increases.

Through separating your work in progress from your archived

documents (either through simple folder structure or through effective

metadata), your team will discover the following benefits in the near if

not immediate future:

Quick views into the status of

projects in progress

Less wasted time in working on

current projects and initiatives

Clarity in understanding which

projects are closed and the final

documents delivered to clients or

other stakeholders

A more formalized project close-

out process, where documents

must be transferred to the

archived/closed project folder

More effective reference material

through clearly marking the

finalized/closed projects and

documents

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Tip 10 – Document to Improve Your Performance at Work

& Your Life Documentation Improves Human Behaviour. Writing down our goals and actions has long

been recognized by self-help experts as a powerful tool for planning, visualizing and realizing

our dreams.

The power of this simple, no-tech tool beats all diets, complex investment strategies and

expensive coaching seminars. The principle of this practice rings true too in the workplace,

with its necessity only magnified by more people, confusion and competing agendas.

It is true that documentation’s primary purpose is to

safeguard the intellectual capital that organizations spend so

much time to cultivate. Like writing down what we eat,

documentation has an added dimension: improving human

behaviour.

So, improve your documentation skills at the same time

as improving your life goals!

Did you find these tips to be useful? If yes, check out more information in the book Supercharge Your Documentation or else at the website www.leadersinbusinessanalysis.com

Want to lose weight? Write down what you eat.

Want to save money? Write down what you buy.

Want career success? Write down a plan and monitor it.