Documentation is often the last priority in a business’s plan. Most number crunchers only think of the short term, and in the short term everyone in a company gets all of the internal memos about the motivation and details of a plan. It appears that you do not need permanent and clear documentation. So why spend money on the long-term?  What is the ROI of good documentation? After all, if a company does not succeed in the short term then there will not be a long term.

Documentation Isn’t Just About the Long Term

If your products or services are accompanied by instructions, guides, or tutorials then two things will happen:

1. Your customers will invest happy and enjoyable time, right now,  into your product
2. You won’t need as many customer support representatives, and you will save money on labor costs right now

If your company’s workflow and procedures are documented you will get higher productivity from less downtime due to misunderstandings and uncertainty.

Go Big or Go Home

If you are not planning for the future, though, you might as well quit now.  What are you going to do when the big sales start coming in—scramble around and try to not only hire new people but train them as well?  And all while trying to please the new customers?  Good luck with that. No, you need to have everything written down so that these sort of transitions happen seamlessly.

Say you are a software company with a great product that people are using and buying, and a larger company shows interest in buying you out for a large amount?  What are you going to give them, a bunch of code?  Not everyone can read code, and even if you have neatly commented out your code, most people in an organization do not want to sift thorough all of that.  You are going to have to present the prospective buyer with requirements and architecture documents for them to take you seriously.

Your Next Step

Hire a technical writer. Speak with someone who can learn your organization quickly and organize it in the terms that you think are most useful.  The technical writer does not have to have expertise in your field, only the abilities to listen, to categorize concepts and to present the information in every relevant media.  There might be an initial cost, but ROI of good documentation and the initial payoff are now and the potential earnings for your future are much greater.

• Why Writers Should Be Involved Throughout the Project Lifecycle