I spoke with a documentation expert at a DevOps conference in March 2018, and she gave me some radical advice about documentation. The advice is portable to almost any kind of organization and I quickly adopted it for my Church administrative tasks. I asked about the best way to keep records and write documentation, most of my team members at work and Church consistently have a hard time finding key information about a project, initiative or task.
She suggested having a single document for everything, indexed and in sections, a single living document that can be searched for anything. Crazy right? Well, I tried it out, and I absolutely loved it. I actually adopt this approach for almost every project now. As long as the document is well-maintained, indexed and in sections, it’s great to have all the information in one document. Using the find feature on Microsoft Word or Google Docs allows me to quickly scan through and find exactly what I’m looking for. Gone are the days of checking multiple folders and files for some information that may or may not exist. With a single document, if the information isn’t there, it doesn’t exist. Awesome!
