When a process lives in one person’s head, you are one resignation away from losing it. Once it is written down, the next person can pick it up on their first day. The Pattern. Most teams have tried to write a procedures manual at least once and stalled halfway. What exists is out of date,…
If you have grown fast and almost nothing is written down, you are not behind and you are not alone. It is one of the most common things a growing team runs into, and it is rarely a discipline problem.
The documents were written to be complete rather than to be used, and those are different goals. A process written to be followed offloads the knowledge it describes. A process written to be complete just describes it, expensively.
Three versions of the same document sat in a shared drive, all contradicting each other, none updated since the person who wrote them left. A procedure written by one person, signed off by no one, never tested by a second pair of hands is not documentation. It is a liability dressed as one.
