Documentation For The Team

We all have been there, where you are in a situation at work and don't really know what to do, so you look for documentation on what the direction should be. You then find out, that the documentation is old as fuck, or non-existent. What the hell?!

Documentation for the team is one of the things that I've started to do for the simple reason that if there was a gap, I intended to fix it primarily for myself so that if I get into that situation again, it will be a closed gap. Even if it was not really something entirely in scope for what my job is, I will still be closing the gap for the fact that it was there. I am a huge proponent of not letting others around me fail because someone else didn't do something.

I've had many situations in the role that I'm in now where I've looked for something that I needed to do my job such as a process to perform X task but the process was either horribly written, or not written at all but asking colleagues, you would do "XYZ" steps in order to accomplish it. It's good that people remember things but at the same time, the best is when it's written down into something for someone to refer back to later on, or if we onboard someone new! This is one of those things that I strangely enough have fun closing the gaps on.

I've long been of the mindset that in order for me to succeed, it's important that those around me also succeed because there is no way we can succeed in a vacuum. This is an important mentality, and definitely a mentality shift away from how things used to be done in years past. There is a cultural change going on in the workplace that I think has been necessary and brewing for quite some time. I've worked with plenty of people who knew how to do something but didn't want to share that information with others because they were either selfish, incompetent, scared of losing the need of their ability or some other issue. I don't think these are really good reasons to be the keeper of information when it comes to working on a team!

I think it's also important that when we do these things, we try to see if there is anything out there that is existing that can help us. I definitely did this in that I took a template for something sort of similar that someone else had created, and transformed it into what it is now. There is an important lesson to be learned there that we shouldn't reinvent the wheel but that doesn't mean that we can't take a used wheel and improve upon it or change it for our needs. This helped speed up the process tremendously to be honest, which made is much easier for the work to be done to generate this documentation.

Was this something that I was told to do, or asked? Not at all, but there is a lot to be said and I've talked before about taking initiative on things so that you can set yourself apart from others. We have to have an active and growth mindset with so many things in life because those who sit idle and wait for things to happen don't get things happening for them. The big caveat there is that it also requires at least a semblance of a good work environment and team; if your team sucks or your bosses suck and are pieces of shit, then you don't have to do these things if you don't want to. At a minimum though, you should do it to improve the work efficiency of yourself and maybe a work friend if you have a good relationship. Thankfully I didn't have those issues, and I was able to feel good about helping the team and also not feeling like it was a complete waste of time.

What about you, have you taken an initiative at work and completed a task that you wanted to, but weren't required to, to help others? Let me know in the comments!