I spent several years of my life reviewing corporate documents in an independent assurance role at a large company in the UK. The documents were a mix of bids a

I spent several years of my life reviewing corporate documents in an independent assurance role at a large company in the UK. The documents were a mix of bids and research reports intended for external use and internal docs associated with our sales/project process. I raised several concerns about our writing process to management and spent many long hours fixing docs at the last minute. But my concerns didn't get much traction with management. One day, I discovered that our document identifier issuing system (yes, we had one!) could tell you how many docs had been registered by a particular teams in a given time period. This led me to the finding that our department created a new document something like every 58 minutes of a working year! We weren't a software project group, we were in fact a document authoring function that also emitted software and research as a side effect. That observation got some traction with management, and I was funded to develop some how-to-write guidelines for document authors. Bid teams were particularly interested because the cost of document production in bid development often fell directly to the company, not to the eventual customers. In addition to providing a basic 'house' style for authors, the guidelines also highlighted the importance of easy-to-use doc templates and training for lead authors (e.g. those collating docs produced by multiple people, sometimes by sub-contractors).