Documentation

Documentation organization is paramount for a company that is looking to scale in terms of infrastructure and employees. Without proper documentation, incidents take significantly longer to mitigate and information walks out the door when employees leave. To improve documentation, clear guidelines on how to write and structure it should be set similar to these:

1. Having a definitive team frontpage.
2. Writing documentation that is easy enough for a new employee to understand, follow and execute.
3. Making sure the documentation has proper inline references to other linked documentation for speed and ease of access.
4. Documentation should be organized by service.
5. All service documentation should have ownership whether it be an individual or team. This will be especially important as the organization and the number of teams grow and change. In an emergency where every second counts, being able to find the most knowledgeable people quickly is extremely important.
6. Documentation should also have a “common tasks” section, designed for quick action access.
7. Documentation should always read from “easiest” to “hardest” in order and can also have the more gritty background information below in a lower section.
8. Making sure all older documentation adheres to the above standards.
9. Adding a link in the New Hire onboarding documentation to the page describing our documentation standards.
10. Allocating engineering time in a project to documenting the project. Creating a separate ticket for documentation of a feature so it can be tracked separately from the implementation work.

All of these improvements will lead to faster on-call issue handling, increasing uptime, and enables new team members to be productive faster.