This post is the third in a series of posts about making a business case for documentation. It explains how to audit the current state of documentation in your company.

To prepare to make a business case for documentation, you have to first understand your company’s goals and business interests (covered in post 2). The next step is to assess the current state of documentation in your company - Can it qualify as "good documentation", as described in post 1?

Evaluation approaches

To assess the current state of your documentation, we recommend the following approaches. Select all the approaches that are reasonable or relevant in your context.

Evaluate the existing documentation to identify areas for improvement. Look for signs of unevenness, incompleteness, ineffectiveness, or difficulty in maintenance.
Conduct an audit to pinpoint the key pain points, which will help prioritize the areas that need immediate attention.
Gather evidence to support your assessment. This could include feedback from users, metrics on documentation usage, or insights from internal stakeholders such as a support team. According to How Can Technical Writers Get User Feedback on Their Docs, "The quality of the work of a technical writer depends on the satisfaction of their audience. That’s why technical writers need a steady stream of clear consumer feedback to really gauge how their documentation is serving its users."
State the issues with the documentation. This could include gaps, inconsistency, and outdated information.
Provide concrete examples and evidence to support your claims about these issues. For example, you could mention customer complaints, user surveys, time to get the result or deploy, or other indicators of the problems.
Summarize how these problems negatively impact different stakeholders, from developers and end-users to your overall business outcomes. Where easy or appropriate to do so, describe indicative effort, such as "Five minutes wasted per employee, per day, for 200 affected employees, equates to 83 wasted hours per week."

Identifying underlying causes

Let’s say that your research reveals that the current state of documentation is not optimal and there is room for improvement.

Reflect on the root causes of documentation challenges. Consider factors such as:

The prioritization of documentation tasks.
Availability of time and skills among developers.
Suitability of documentation tools and methodologies.
Accountability for documentation quality.

Further challenges are stated in a study by Heretto.

Ratio between writers and engineers

Having a proper balance between technical writers and subject matter experts is essential for the quality and quantity of documentation. Too few writers compared to experts can lead to a struggle in meeting the documentation demand.

As Richard Rabil well highlighted in his blog post there is no ideal, one-size-fits-all ratio. It depends on your business needs, how documentation is currently produced to meet those needs, and if/how additional writers could bring value to the business to meet those needs.

In his article, What is the Optimal Writer:Developer Ratio?, Rob Woodgate suggests to answer 8 questions to determine the ratio that suit your business needs.

Next steps

So, what if documentation is problematic and far from optimal? How does it impact business interests?

In our next blog post, we will talk about specifics related to business, starting with revenue and website traffic.

Making a business case for documentation, post 3 - Assess the current state of your documentation

Evaluation approaches

Identifying underlying causes

Ratio between writers and engineers

Next steps

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