Insivible Panes and Broken Windows

The Microsoft Office documents that you probably spend half your life writing and reading rarely live much longer than a few months. Why?

I think there are two major reasons that stop documents being re-used and living past the project they were developed for. These are:

Invisible Panes
There is such an overhead to changing a document that most people don't bother. Change control acts like a pane of glass protecting the document from changes. Version numbers, dates in file name, change-logs, checking out and then in, reviews, all the minutiae of changing a document is so high that it is a wonder it happens at all.

This is not even a rational cost/benefit call it becomes a psychological effect where people don't even see that they *could* make some small changes.

This means change is only cost-effective when it is a large volume of change from the one personal batched up together. Updating a few lines, fixing a spelling mistake, or fixing some out-of-date point is hardly worthwhile. 5 seconds of typing is completely subsumed within the admin time to make it happen.

End Result?

Documents are written by a small groups of people in big blocks in a short intense period by people who own a particular document, however...

Software is developed by large groups of people each performing a series of small tasks over a much longer period by people who have diffuse knowledge of the whole environment.

Ask yourself - how long would it take to you change a comma to a full-stop in a signed-off document stored in your system of record?

This mismatch means that most documents are valid once, and never get updated again. They could get re-used for the next project, except for..

Broken Windows

Once a document gets a little bit out of date it will never be updated. If one part is old, the document itself becomes "old" and will stop receiving any small updates. If will then become even more out of date and becomes out of data or receive in the dreaded moniker "in the old format". New projects will find it easier to start all over again. So if information isn't kept up-to-date it will age rapidly.

Just like a few broken windows in a building encourage more vandals and the building will quickly becomes a dump - so too a few imperfections in a document means the entire things is condemned.

Solution?

Properly structured Wikis tend to fix both these problems. They remove %98 of the overhead to make an edit, and if your content is in lots of small wiki pages people will be far happier to update a few pieces of information on one page - than embark on a full-fledged clean up.

Really - it's all about embedding knowledge management and cleanliness into your day-to-day organisational processes - instead of structuring your activities around the tools like most people do.