Working with documents involves collaborating and creating the information resources needed to complete work. This is especially relevant when working on big projects with lots of moving parts, for example, creating software. Documentation helps everyone stay on the same page, and also saves time trying to understand instructions or steps to follow that somebody else has already documented.
In general, documents, and especially those produced by organisations or other professional settings follow certain conventions and standard practices. This helps create a more transparent and uniform workflow and ecosystem for documentation. Documents can be structured or semistructured. For instance handwritten letters, note or a tabular list based form. In general, though documents generally contain a mix of text and other non-textual elements, such as images, tables, and graphs.
To ensure a productive collaboration of documents it is best to break teams up into groups with different levels of access and permissions to the documents. This allows each team to concentrate on its own projects without having concerns about modifying or erasing the work of others. Also, it is important to implement the concept of version control, which means that you can keep track of and restore previous versions of documents. In addition, it provides allowing for both the synchronous and asynchronous communications within the document. By establishing these guidelines, you will be able to ensure that all team members have the most favorable chance of success when using your company’s documentation.
