Re:Encouraging a culture of written communication
by yolo42 on Monday May 11, 2020 @11:16PM
(#23150248)
I've adopted the doc of docs method and it has made my life incredibly easy! I was in a position where I'm a bottleneck of information because no one else in the company new about the product other than me. I wrote a ton of documentation for employees and users but I still was spending upwards of 20 hours every week just answering questions. I built the doc of docs in 2 hours and that has helped significantly. Combine this with always replying with a link instead of a dedicated explanation has been extremely fruitful!
Re:Encouraging a culture of written communication
by specialist on Monday May 11, 2020 @02:08PM
(#23145125)
Maybe also add basic metrics. Like number of views, popularity over time, sparklines for edit activity, ...
Maybe even some social features, with a decay rate. So teammates recently tagging things as "helpful!" could nudge me to pay attention.
Any additional signal to help noobs like me while foraging.
Re:Encouraging a culture of written communication
by simonw on Monday May 11, 2020 @02:11PM
(#23145151)
An idea I had but never really executed on was a mechanism for tagging documentation as "should be reviewed at least once every X months" - for things like setting up developer environments.
That way a team could be alerted if their documentation was due-for-review. One person gets assigned a task to review it. They look through it, update it if necessary, and either way put a "last reviewed by X on date Y" tag on it so people who read it can tell that it's still relevant.
Re:Encouraging a culture of written communication
by SamuelAdams on Monday May 11, 2020 @04:18PM
(#23146524)
At that rate you're better off buying some software that handles all this for you. Enter Microsoft Sharepoint. Yikes.
1. Having a "doc of docs" for each team - a document (Google Doc, wiki page, whatever) that acts as an index for all of the other documentation. If anyone asks "where's the documentation for X?" the answer should be "It's in the doc-of-docs. And if it isn't, it's your job to find it and put a link to it in the doc-of-docs".
2. Get a good search engine! I built a search engine for work that indexed documentation content from 8 different sources, because building a single search index was easier than convincing dozens of teams to switch the documentation solution they were using. I used an improved variant of the technique I described in https://24ways.org/2018/fast-autocomplete-search-for-your-we...