Documentation is the recording of organizational structures, policies, actions, and goals, and is vital to any work field, specially for those in development. Even outside of the development world, documentation plays a fundamental role in business. It defines standard procedures, ensuring everyone in the company does things the same way. It streamlines processes, allowing people to look up answers instead of asking coworkers or reinventing the wheel. It also acts as protection during audits, helping to pinpoint any actions taken against policy.
First, it’s important to develop your documentation alongside the actual process. You have to consider documentation a priority, updating it while the work you’ve done is fresh in your mind. Will that make you work slower? At first, yes, but over the long run it will save you time. Instead of thinking of documentation as something that hampers your real work, consider it as part of that work. You can’t set aside part of your job because it’s slowing down another part.
Second, streamline your documentation process to require the least amount of extra work. It’s especially important not to duplicate information. Another possibility is to set up automatic documentation procedures, so that you only need to manually fill in specific information, e.g. setting up a Google document. This takes a bit of extra effort to set up at first, but it reduces the work in the long run.
Third, be sure to structure your documentation. If you’re documenting your work as you do it, it’s likely that the documentation will be close to the actual work, both in detail and in location. Make sure that your documentation gives a clear starting point to someone who doesn’t already know what they’re doing. Hunting for the right documentation is often just as frustrating as trying to understand the work itself.
Documenting your work will make you more organized and eventually, you will reap a lot of benefits out of it!
The reason we mention it today, is that in many fields we have been working in, especially science, health with young people, we have observed insufficient data that has been documented by any agency. Data collection and documentation in a country like India is a big task in terms of effort monetarily and of time. Distances and differences in terms of language etc. across the country do not make it any easy. However, from our projects, we have learnt that thus documenting the goals, process, steps and end results of research are important to have these learnings passed on to other people or teams who may be working on the same projects or topics. It allows for us to work in collaboration increasing the impact of the overall research. Even documenting failures is hugely helpful.
We hope you’re now able to see documentation in a better light and that you’re inspired by why you must begin documenting and collaborating on research going forward!