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Business answer: With everything, including this, there needs to be a balance. The ROI on documenting every single inch of progress as accurately possible is ex

by jemka 15y ago

Business answer: With everything, including this, there needs to be a balance. The ROI on documenting every single inch of progress as accurately possible is extremely low in most cases. Additionally every case (industry, business, project) is different and one size doesn't fit all. Personal answer: Because we are lazy.

johndcook 15y ago
I agree that there has to be a balance to how much an organization documents. But I'm more concerned with how little organizations read than how little they write. If they wrote a little less, they might read more. Maybe instead of voluminous meeting minutes, organizations should have a little notebook labeled "Why we decided what we did."
- cperciva 15y ago
  And who decides what goes into that notebook? In a committee of 10 people you'll have at least 10 and usually far more reasons for and against any significant proposal.
  - johndcook 15y ago
    Maybe a committee could include a brief summary of pro and con arguments, sort of a miniature version of the legal practice of consenting and dissenting opinions. On the other hand, I could understand why some organizations would be afraid to do this. They don't want to write down anything that could look bad in the future as part of a legal discovery. In that case, there's an incentive to promote institutional amnesia.
- gvb 15y ago
  A couple of observations: 1) If the record is not electronic, there is no way to share it and typically no way to discover it. Manual search of paper documentation sucks. Before Al Gore invented the interwebs, I kept lots of notes in notebooks. I almost never shared the notes and almost never referred to them after the development phase of the project ended. I now use a wiki and "issues" in a tracking system (e.g. Redmine) to keep my "engineering notebooks". This has proven invaluable time and again. 2) The importance of decisions is mostly discovered in retrospect. :-( I find many holes in my notes when I do something a second time, even when I think I'm keeping good notes the first time. The good news is that my notes are pretty good after the second pass. 3) I don't know if it is laziness, inconvenience, or otherwise, but my experience is similar to the OP in that I tend to take fewer notes that I should and I have a hard time getting my coworkers to take half as many notes as I take. :-( Again, I find an electronic notebook open in a web browser on the desktop you are doing the work on is much more effective than paper and pen. Cut'n'paste >> pen >> sword.
  - re_todd 15y ago
    I started using Tomboy notes (and recently Gnote) to write short notes. They have a good, quick search built in to lookup old notes. They are easy to backup as well (copy .tomboy/ or .gnote/ subdirectory from home diretory).
- randomdata 15y ago
  > Why we decided what we did. Most decisions in business end up being arbitrary anyway. Humans are largely irrational creatures who make choices on emotion. I am not sure you can properly document why a given choice was made, and even if you can, it is of little interest to future readers who come with their own set of emotions. Another option is to document the failures to warn future generations. However, as the article points out, things change rapidly. What didn't work yesterday might be the perfect solution tomorrow.
  - johndcook 15y ago
    It's fun to think of candid rationales. "We did this because Joe bullied us into it. When he leaves the company, we're undoing it the next day." Or "Sue was able to keep her wits later in the evening than the rest of us, so we agreed to anything she wanted just so we could go home and sleep."

by jemka 15y ago

johndcook 15y ago

I agree that there has to be a balance to how much an organization documents. But I'm more concerned with how little organizations read than how little they write. If they wrote a little less, they might read more. Maybe instead of voluminous meeting minutes, organizations should have a little notebook labeled "Why we decided what we did."

cperciva 15y ago
And who decides what goes into that notebook? In a committee of 10 people you'll have at least 10 and usually far more reasons for and against any significant proposal.
- johndcook 15y ago
  Maybe a committee could include a brief summary of pro and con arguments, sort of a miniature version of the legal practice of consenting and dissenting opinions. On the other hand, I could understand why some organizations would be afraid to do this. They don't want to write down anything that could look bad in the future as part of a legal discovery. In that case, there's an incentive to promote institutional amnesia.
gvb 15y ago
A couple of observations: 1) If the record is not electronic, there is no way to share it and typically no way to discover it. Manual search of paper documentation sucks. Before Al Gore invented the interwebs, I kept lots of notes in notebooks. I almost never shared the notes and almost never referred to them after the development phase of the project ended. I now use a wiki and "issues" in a tracking system (e.g. Redmine) to keep my "engineering notebooks". This has proven invaluable time and again. 2) The importance of decisions is mostly discovered in retrospect. :-( I find many holes in my notes when I do something a second time, even when I think I'm keeping good notes the first time. The good news is that my notes are pretty good after the second pass. 3) I don't know if it is laziness, inconvenience, or otherwise, but my experience is similar to the OP in that I tend to take fewer notes that I should and I have a hard time getting my coworkers to take half as many notes as I take. :-( Again, I find an electronic notebook open in a web browser on the desktop you are doing the work on is much more effective than paper and pen. Cut'n'paste >> pen >> sword.
- re_todd 15y ago
  I started using Tomboy notes (and recently Gnote) to write short notes. They have a good, quick search built in to lookup old notes. They are easy to backup as well (copy .tomboy/ or .gnote/ subdirectory from home diretory).
randomdata 15y ago
> Why we decided what we did. Most decisions in business end up being arbitrary anyway. Humans are largely irrational creatures who make choices on emotion. I am not sure you can properly document why a given choice was made, and even if you can, it is of little interest to future readers who come with their own set of emotions. Another option is to document the failures to warn future generations. However, as the article points out, things change rapidly. What didn't work yesterday might be the perfect solution tomorrow.
- johndcook 15y ago
  It's fun to think of candid rationales. "We did this because Joe bullied us into it. When he leaves the company, we're undoing it the next day." Or "Sue was able to keep her wits later in the evening than the rest of us, so we agreed to anything she wanted just so we could go home and sleep."