5 Tips on Documentation in IT Small Business Support in 2024

Unmasking 5 important documentation tips for small and medium business will be the discussion of today's topic. These 5 tips, if followed, will ensure that you resolve the vast majority of your organization's documentation struggles.

Regardless as to if you use a documentation platform such as Hudu, ITGlue or MS Sharepoint, it is not so much the tools you use to manage your MSP documentation, the methods and documentation strategy that you use is actually far more important.

The 5 most important strategic actions for the best tech documentation outcome is what I will outline today.

While you are here, Take a look at some of our other MSP Consulting related articles below that may interest you:

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• Interesting Reasons Most MSPs Fail
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Consistency

I am putting this as the number one item on the list, without documentation consistency, you may as well not waste your time any further. Grab yourself some water based paint and while dribbling, throw it at your most expensive print server because that behavior will give you the same outcome without the ingredient of consistency.

I have helped at least 20 service organizations over the last 10 years to overhaul their documentation systems to a point where they are helping rather than hindering. If you do nothing else to improve the way you document your processes, then consistency alone will help you move further than any other single strategy.

Consistency of documentation includes ensuring that the way you deliver it to your technical support desk employees is the same every single time. From folder structure of file systems to the font that gets used and the way in which you separate paragraphs or the way you use bullet points.

Consistency for the end consumer of your documentation fosters trust amongst your staff and without it you will breed employee distrust amongst your staff and client staff.

Framework

I strongly advocate for buying off the shelf documentation tools such as the Hudu documentation management system. You need to decide what you are, are you the guy hammering nails or are you the guy making the hammers? You cannot do both with any level of competence.

Sure that Access database you built back in 1997 has done a good job, but the truth is when compared to current industry leading documentation platforms, it is junk. Roll your own documentation platforms using a combination of OneNote and Sharepoint need to be eliminated if you want to remain competitive in today’s market.

Training

It amazes me the amount of experienced business leaders that believe that they can just buy something like IT Glue or Hudu off the shelf and expect their staff to either just start using it or even know how to build an effective foundation.

They are shocked when having invested in these documentation platforms that their investment is not showing an immediate financial return. I am afraid to say that a return on investment is not possible without a significant investment in training.

You should also be seeking out organizations that specialize in implementing documentation platforms and who have seen what works, what does not work and repeated it dozens of times in the past.

Regardless as to if your solution is self built off the shelf, a significant effort needs to be made to ensure that future staff members can be brought on board with as little effort as possible and that ex staff members are not walking away with significant amounts of knowledge.

Ongoing training is the only real way to ensure that your organization becomes scalable in both directions. It makes the process of onboarding new staff members as well as offboarding ex clients or staff members a breeze.

Stick With A Plan

Always stick with a documentation maintenance plan once you have committed to a strategy.

I often see service providers being driven by staff movements. So the person who had perhaps implemented a documentation strategy and successfully ensured all other staff followed the processes suddenly leaves and their replacement decides it would be a good time to put his own stamp on things and within 3 months radically changes the documentation process before deciding it is not for him and moves on within 6 months leaving half of their changes incomplete.

Rinse and repeat a few times and suddenly you have a documentation disaster on your hands. This has knock on effects where it makes it hard to get work completed so tech staff develop low morale and suddenly the churning of staff becomes a very real problem.

This is like a snowball where staff stay less time meaning nobody stays around long enough to fix the problem that is causing employees to leave.

Outsourcing Documentation Tasks

I strongly advocate for separating the documentation framework and ongoing documentation tasks from internal employee duties for several reasons.

The biggest reason is that most technical staff do not enjoy completing documentation to the standard needed to make it effective.

There is more often than not plenty of internal petty disagreements whereby the most senior employee will win any particular discussion on how to proceed and that is often not the best decision when it comes to creating a more effective documentation platform or for the profitability of the company.

External organizations that specialize in documentation management are experts at getting the most out of the documentation suite of tools you are using, are not impacted by internal staff politics and have seen whatever problem you are facing often several times before and solved it.

Internal staff tend to move on more often than a service provider and they have less scrutiny put on them for what is often considered an ancillary task, something to be done if they get time and when it does get done, no two technicians will ever complete a document to the same standard as the other.

It has been my experience that outsourcing documentation management causes a huge improvement in documentation effectiveness over a much longer time frame than managing documentation internally has.

Conclusion

The way companies manage the way they distribute information from password management, flexible assets, configurations to training documentation is the last remaining area where competitive advantage is magnified and simultaneously is an area many service providers still do not take seriously.

Improving information management even by a small margin will see you improve efficiency across your whole organization as well as make it more likely that your clients will stick around for longer than they otherwise would.

We have a number of other MSP consulting related articles listed below that will provide you with more detailed information on a number of related topics:

https://optimizeddocs.com/blogs/consulting/consulting-index-page-01

Our team specializes in strategies for Network service organizations and we assist in improving profit margins through standardization and consistent record keeping strategies, so you can be confident that our content is tailored to your needs.

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