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What are the 3 C's of documentation?

Consistency, Compliance, Completeness The 3 C's of Process Documentation (Consistency, Compliance, Completeness) And Why You Should Care.

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There's one thing worse than no documentation. It's inconsistent, inaccurate or incomplete documentation. Yet 90% of the time when you're looking for guidance to solve a software issue or comply with an organisational procedure, that's what you end up with. Frequently written off as merely inconvenient, low quality documentation is in fact a serious organisational issue that continues to create a vast amount of friction for software users and internal teams.

So let's explore the 3 C's of quality documentation for a moment.

Compliance

The big picture for large organisations is that each person needs to perform every task the same way. Getting everyone to comply with policies and procedures is a number one priority and they invest deeply in making this happen. Whether it's entering information into a CRM or working at a checkout, people are required to follow a particular set of steps, simply because that's the requirement. The organisation continually needs to communicate all this job related information to its employees and the way they do that is very often piecemeal. There are policy documents, knowledge bases and emails from managers. Maybe the board says something. The holy grail for this situation is a set of centralised documentation that communicates in a rock solid way and keeps individuals informed and compliant with the thousands of policies and procedures they may come into contact with at any given time.

Consistency

Consistency is one of the things holding our understanding of the world together so you could say it's quite important. We want things belonging to the same group to look and feel the same, and when they don't, everything feels disorienting and disorganised.

Here are a few factors that contribute to inconsistency:

Instructional materials are often documented in different media: textbooks, log books, standards documents, user manuals, intranet, etc. Within the same media, a set of materials can sometimes contain ten variations of the same document. The natural tendency for individuals to develop their own workarounds can lead to a star-crossed mashup of Paint, Word, Textpad and all manner of screenshot tools.

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Now if only there were a single, centralised tool that could be used by everyone on the team to create a single set of consistent outputs.

Completeness

Lack of completeness is another factor drastically affecting documentation quality. It can take the form of missing steps, incomplete explanations or processes that trail off into nothing and leave a customer or team member halfway through a task with nowhere to go but down. This situation is often the result of not allowing adequate time for documenting at the planning stage or not starting the documentation task early enough in the project lifecycle. So how does your project or process documentation stack up against the 3 C's of compliance, consistency and completeness? Leave a comment and let me know. One of the truly magical things about our rapid authoring solution WalkThru is that it is lightning fast. This is great news because getting the job done is what we're all aiming for – and, like it or not, documentation is a major part of that effort. Even better, because WalkThru is the right tool for the job, rapid doesn't have to mean making concessions on quality. You can go fast and smash it out, all without cutting corners. That's because WalkThru is designed from the ground up to capture procedural information quickly and easily, automatically format it with its built-in instructional design smarts and publish it to a range of digital and print formats. Decide for yourself by downloading a free trial at walkthrusoftware.com, or contact our sales team on info@walkthrusoftware.com or +61 2 9188 3999.

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