Digital or analog
Clear and concise documentation is a requirement for any project, or for any training programme looking to provide comprehensive reference documents to support a training course.
Documentation should be designed in the most accessible format. This means it should be designed so that it can be read and understood by as wide an audience as possible. It should be readable by a screen-reader as well as be in a format that can be easily printed.
Documentation can be hosted:
- online within an Intranet or Internet site
- within a searchable Content Management System
- on a team Sharepoint site
- embedded within an application's help feature
... or many other formats.
 Some documentation examples
- Training support materials – Student workbooks, application reference manuals, policy or procedural diagrams, flash-cards, etc.
- Requirements documents – Outline the requirements needed from a product by a business group, system or stakeholder point-of-view.
- Business processes – Detailed analysis of the steps an employee or whole department may go through to perform a business task. Usually accompanied with detailed flow-charts and diagrams.
- High-level and low-level design documents – Detail the design of a proposed product. High-level design to provide an overview of the design (aimed at a stakeholder audience etc), and a low-level design to thoroughly detail every technical aspect of the design.
- Testing scripts – Sets of instructions to be performed by a tester to prove/disprove the designed functionality of a product is working.
- Technical documents and data sheets – Documents to explain a product component and summarise its configuration, settings, anticipated performance, output and other attributes.
- Product user guides and manuals – Documents containing an overview and breakdown of a product with step-by-step instructions on how it is to be used by individual/group/role.
- Administration guides – Management, monitoring and maintenance instructions for a product or system. Typically including a more detailed view of the inner workings of a product or system that a normal user would not see. These guides need to contain abstracts from the low-level design with clearly defined maintenance steps.
- Cue-cards – These can be user specific or administrator specific. Typically a one page laminated card containing quick, to the point instructions for performing a single task.
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All of these products would aim to encompass the underlying business process along with the functionality of any systems being used.
Documentation would go hand-in-hand with an implementation strategy that would involve classroom training, e-learning, floor walkers, a knowledge base for Service Desk support and corporate communications. AT3D can provide all of these products and more.
