Document, Document, Document — Good Documentation is the Gateway to Automation

Before we dive into the how of automation, I thought it best to discuss my favorite gateway to automation: documentation. In the initial essay in this series, I defined automation as anything that eases the effort needed to complete a task. Therefore, documentation can help us before we do a task, during a task, and can be written and refined after a task.

Why Document? Overcoming Documentation Inertia

I titled this article with a mantra I shared with many young leaders who were new to supervision and experiencing their first issues with workplace performance: document, document, document. The best way to deal with any performance problem is to focus specifically on the issue itself and avoid personalizing it. Documentation allows you to provide concrete examples of where and how the problem occurred. These performance conversations are never easy, but documentation makes them easier by keeping the discussion factual instead of personal.

Many people resist documenting anything. As Pragati Sinha wrote in The Art of Writing Good Documentation, people offer excuses like it’s a waste of time, no one reads it, or no one has time to use it. But, as Sinha points out, these are simply excuses. Writing good documentation is hard. Figuring out how to make something understandable to the audience, whether that’s you or a public audience, is not easy. Programmer Damian Conway wrote in Perl Best Practices…