The Importance of Document Templates

Posted on 11. Aug, 2009 by in Business Efficiency, Documentation & Training, Prima Communications Blog, Writing & Marketing

Try to imagine a house built without an architect. Now try envisioning a startup business without a business model. Lastly, try imagining a filling line or packaging center running smoothly without operating procedures or processes written, approved, and in place. What is each of these scenarios missing? Planning. Without someone drafting ideas and finalizing clear, written plans, nearly everything becomes impossible.

Documenting plans, procedures, instructions, scientific findings, tests, or simply ideas is crucial to a job well done. The way to ensure that documentation is valuable and correct every time is by designing and using templates. A document template acts as an outline to follow when developing or documenting just about anything. A good template provides many benefits, including:

  1. Consistency
    A template ensures the same points and details are related every time. There’s no need to worry about missing information or what was done or not done previously.
  2. Clarity
    Templates remove the guesswork from documentation. Because information and details are outlined for the user, the purpose of the document is clear and concise, streamlining the documentation process.
  3. Form
    Rather than reviewing plans or procedures that all look different and contain information in varying order, templates allow for a consistency of form that enables users to know where to find what they’re looking for in every document.
  4. Completeness
    Templates ensure that all necessary information is included in a document. Each time the template is used, specific details are required to fill in the page. This makes it hard to erroneously leave something out
  5. Efficiency
    Instead of rewriting entire documents each time they’re needed, templates enable a document to be created once and then reused over and over again. The only difference from document to document is the specific information being provided. This saves valuable time and money, because employees no longer have to reinvent the wheel when they work. All they have to do is open the template and start providing the required information.

Templates help make documentation manageable, reliable, and effective, and they do so through planning. By designing a template that fulfills all of the desired needs when documenting a process, procedure, test script, or anything else, a business can realize great savings on resources. And the business itself will run a lot more smoothly.

Simplify documentation by using templates. After all, a house can be built without an architect, but would you want to live in it?

Why Don’t Companies Make Documentation a Priority?

Posted on 05. Jan, 2009 by in Documentation & Training, Prima Communications Blog

The last time I surfed the FDA site to check on recent 483s (those nasty and all-too-frequent warning letters), about two-thirds were documentation-related. Either companies did not have procedures in place, did not follow the procedures they had, or had insufficient procedures.

Anyone who works in an FDA-regulated environment is used to documentation. It’s everywhere and covers almost any activity you can think of, yet companies don’t generally focus on ways to make their documentation better. Most companies treat documentation as something that just has to be done—and thereby miss the opportunity to make their employees’ jobs easier, boost first-time quality, and optimize processes.

How do I know most companies don’t make documentation a priority? There are three primary clues:

  1. The sheer number of audit findings related to documentation. I think most companies generally do a good job on their principal task, whether that is making car parts or implantable hips. Documentation, however, is often ineffective, redundant, and contradictory.
  2. The poor quality of most documentation. As a contractor I see many companies’ procedures, and generally I find many more bad procedures than good ones.
  3. The fact that most companies don’t use documentation professionals. Most companies will have whoever is responsible for a task develop the procedure for that task. There are many problems with this method, not least of which is if the person responsible for the procedure writes it, he or she may leave out steps that seem obvious or feel automatic. Also, most engineers, quality professionals, and managers are not writers by trade and don’t have the passion for effective documentation that a technical writer has, or perhaps the skills to integrate pictures and diagrams to clarify concepts.

Good documentation begins when you know what the documentation is for. Often an initial process map is useful in uncovering the true process and decision points that need to be documented. Once you know what you are going to document and why, you can begin to design documents that will clearly guide users. In some cases highly graphical lean documents may be more appropriate than standard text-based procedures.

In other cases maybe the only documentation needed is a few lines of instruction on a form or log instead of a separate procedure. In almost every case though, before a new procedure is developed or an existing one modified, the documentation set needs to be examined holistically to ensure things are not contradictory. And, in almost every case a good technical writer can improve a company’s documentation and help avoid one—or more—of those unwelcome 483s.