Best Practices for Process Documentation: Checklists (1 of 3)

I've written before about process documentation and the need for checklists - especially for repeatable and complex processes that you may not perform every single day. A written process solves a multitude of issues: Security: For complex processes with integrated platforms, a detailed list keeps you from forgetting key settings, switches, and process steps that you might forget Reality: No matter how "advanced" or "highly engineered" these systems are, there is always something that must be done in just the…

Optimizing the Wrong Part of Knowledge Management

16 March, 2008
Documentation
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I sat in on the report-out session from a kaizen event this week, and something occurred to me as I reviewed a ton of interesting findings in a very short time ... Best Practice Self-contained deliverables are the most powerful tools for knowledge knowledge transfer you can have in your organization. I'm talking about a document that stands on its own, and effectively communicates an idea without needing the author nearby to explain anything. The topic doesn't matter - conceptual…

The Joy of Programming, the Challenge of KM

alternate title - Techs Managing Techs; not Required, but it Helps This evening, catching up with my RSS feeds, I happened upon this old screencast from Jon Udell, looking over the shoulder as he and Anders Hejlsberg take a look at LINQ, a work-in-process set of extensions for the .NET framework. Udell captured my curiousity with this description of the session ... You have to be a certain kind of person to enjoy watching Anders run LINQ through its paces,…

Quality requirements for technical documentation are lower than user documentation

Ok, don't freak out now ... All I want to point out is that the apparent need for screen prints of every step in the process is a bit overdone, especially when we're talking about technical documents. Screen prints / images in the documentation typically means the electronic documents get unmanageably huge, even if you shrink the .JPGs, and few people know how to do that. Plus, you indirectly commit yourself / your organization to a huge maintenance burden. because…

Implementing Intranet on Speed: The Beginning

This week, we're kicking off a new project, implementing an intranet / portal for our newly independent company. I'm fascinated at how the "state of the art " has moved forward so much since the "old days" of the 90's. This is actually my third or fourth cut at an application like this (depending on how you define "portal"), and I'm sure it's going a bit faster simply because we're skipping over some portal design and admin process "dead ends"…