Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Producing a lot of documentation doesn’t ensure project success. Sometimes, when emphasized incorrectly, a lot of documentation can ensure project failure. Keep in mind the purposes of documentation.

This week during one of those little lulls that occur in even the busiest of endeavors, an engineer and I were chatting. For some reason, he told me about a project manager we both know named Mike.

“Mike was telling me,” his story went, “about this project that they just cancelled. They had documented everything on the project, but the project was a failure, wasting lots of money and manpower.”

We both shook our heads and laughed. From somewhere, I said, “Electrons can’t read.”

Mike’s project – the well documented failure – isn’t a surprise. I know Mike’s organization. They are infamous for lack of documentation. Any of their projects that produce anything can be deemed successes because they have no documented requirements. And, as in Alice in Wonderland, if you don’t know where you are going, any destination is fine.

It is unfortunate (Mike works for a government agency, all projects funded by taxpayers) that most of the projects in Mike’s organization are failures. One big explanation for the high failure rate is they don’t document anything; everyone works in the direction they think best, and none of the subsystems integrate into a functioning system.

As a(n over)reaction now and then, Mike’s organization concentrates on documenting everything. The outcome is predictable. They employ people who document well, but who design, build, and test poorly. The result is a large stack of good documents, but…electrons can’t read, so their systems don’t work.

A few notes about documentation:

Documentation serves a purpose – to help people communicate

Documentation doesn’t have to be documents – it can be videos, sketches on walls, photos of white boards

Documentation is not the system – that only works in novels

Don’t measure documentation – we succeed at what we measure, so measure system performance

Other notes you would like to pass along? Please remember, electrons can’t read.