IT Documentation 101: Types and Best Practices

Any organization that relies on IT systems benefits from having thorough documentation to back up the various processes they use. Without that documentation, operations like onboarding new employees, troubleshooting problems and optimizing workflows become inefficient and inconsistent.

By creating IT documentation, organizations support a consistent knowledge base where seasoned and new employees can reference standard operating procedures (SOPs) and incident response plans. 

Developing documentation might seem daunting at first, but in this article, we’ll share some helpful best practices. We’ll also suggest software you can leverage to make the process more efficient while significantly improving the quality of your finished documents.

Wh‎at’s IT Documentation?

IT documentation is a broadly applicable term that describes all the documents IT teams use to learn how their systems work, what they’re best suited for and how to troubleshoot issues. This term typically includes:

• Technical documentation: Specifications, diagrams and compliance information that provide an authoritative source of truth when IT professionals need to verify important technical details.
• End-user documentation: SOPs, troubleshooting guides and best practices meant to teach users how to use an IT system correctly.

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‎‎Benefits of IT Documentation

Creating comprehensive technical and end-user documentation provides the following advantages.

Simplified Onboarding

Your IT documentation becomes an essential resource for new hires who need to learn about your organization’s SOPs, incident response plans and software. To maximize this benefit, create a training plan that outlines the steps a new employee should take to complete their onboarding. This way, they’ll get a more structured onboarding experience, and trainers will be less likely to miss important details.

Enhanced Collaboration and Communication

Your IT documentation is integral to communicating clearly and consistently. It establishes standardized processes and terminology everyone can reference when collaborating, which creates a shared understanding.

For example, say you’re creating different tiers of complexity when writing SOPs. As projects come in, you can indicate which SOPs employees should follow, which will provide everything they need to know about that project’s complexity and nuances. If team members hit a snag, you can ask where they were in the SOPs to glean valuable context about how the problem arose.

Preserved Knowledge

IT documentation captures the learnings your team has gained over the years, from the most effective troubleshooting techniques to software use best practices. Having a central repository for that knowledge ensures everyone benefits from it and that nothing is forgotten. Knowledge transfers will also go more smoothly, as you can hand off a comprehensive resource to anyone who needs to learn about your operations.

Streamlined Referencing

Rediscovering solutions and tracking down technical specifications are both time-consuming tasks. They require people to ask around and scour old documents to find something they can only partially rely on. It’s much better to have an updated, consistent source of truth that people can reference whenever they need to answer a question.

‎Types of IT documentation

Here are some examples of common IT document types many organizations use:

• System documentation describes a computer system's hardware and software components and how they interact.
• Infrastructure documentation is the physical and logical infrastructure of an organization's IT environment, including networks, servers and storage devices.
• Process documentation ensures everyone follows the most efficient procedure workflow. 
• Incident response documentation outlines how to respond to IT incidents like security breaches and system outages.
• Device documentation helps technicians quickly examine a device’s specifications, such as its external IP address, operating system and software.
• Credential documentation stores secure information like the usernames and passwords necessary to operate IT environments. 
• Environmental documentation describes how different devices in a company’s IT ecosystem interact and rely on each other.

5 IT‎‎ Documentation Best Practices

Follow these five best practices for creating IT documentation to ensure you establish a valuable knowledge base.

1. Create an Outline

Before writing anything, plan how to structure your documentation to guide the writing process. Consider how you’ll publish it. Should it be a wiki you circulate internally, a printed manual or multiple documents stored on a shared drive? 

Then, create an outline that lays out all the documents you need, along with any assets and templates you should use. That outline will serve as a checklist. Creating every necessary page becomes an independent task with clear goals, making it easier to distribute the work and collaborate.

2. Automate

Wherever possible, rely on automated tools that can provide more accurate results than manual data entry. Scribe, for example, captures the process you use to complete a task and outputs AI-generated documentation that describes it. It does much more, but this feature alone cuts down on ample time spent “Alt + Tabbing” back and forth as you walk through a process and write out each step.

Let automated documentation software, especially AI-powered ones, handle the repetitive, tedious tasks. AI excels at such work, while you can spend time refining the documentation in ways only a human can — like adding helpful suggestions, useful formatting or diagrams that visualize the workflow.

3. Maintain a Consistent Style and Format

Consistent formatting is crucial because it teaches the reader how to interpret your guides. Establish conventions for headings, text styles and lists, then follow them precisely. Readers will pick up on their meanings and more easily follow along. 

For instance, thoughtfully formatted headings make it easier to determine where one concept ends and another begins. Well-written documentation thrives when it's organized based on consistent headings.

4. Practice Version Control

Ensure that whichever platform you use to manage your IT documentation has a version control system (VCS). That way, you can roll back to a previous version if a change wasn’t helpful or needed. This can happen often as you document experimental features or try new processes, some of which won’t work out. With a VCS, you can undo any changes without wasting resources.

5. Make Documentation an Ongoing Activity

Many engineering and development teams wait to write documentation until the very end of their workflow. Just before the product is ready to launch, they hurriedly churn out a massive, disjointed document that’s very difficult to use. Then, realizing their error, they hire a writer to iron it out.

Instead, write documentation as you go, fitting it onto workflows as small, doable tasks to complete while teams create features and designs. By the time your product is complete, the documentation will be, too, and you’ll have plenty of time to polish it up.

Top 4 IT Documentation Tools

Explore four of the best IT documentation tools available to decide which might be best for you and your team.

1. Scribe’s IT Documentation Generator

Scribe is an automated solution for creating comprehensive, up-to-date documentation with less effort and more accuracy. Its algorithms analyze your IT infrastructure to automatically detect the tools and configurations you use. Then, it can observe as you complete the task you want it to document. When you’re done, Scribe will automatically generate documentation using the correct terminology. You can even customize the results with formatting, call-out boxes and additional information. 

2. Document360

Document360 is a straightforward platform for building and managing self-service knowledge bases. It sets itself apart by also helping you format and design your pages to create an engaging, unique user experience. And the tool tracks performance metrics like which articles readers visit most and how readers are rating your pages.

3. Nuclino

Nuclino is another straightforward knowledge base builder with a focus on simplicity and speed. Their text editor is so streamlined that they virtually eliminated load times, which is an incredible time-saver. The tool also features an AI assistant called Sidekick that can do everything from draft emails to suggest team-building activities to make the most of your shared knowledge center.

4. ProProfs

ProProfs is a deeply-customizable knowledge base editor that offers many templates and integrations aimed at helping you create a visually appealing knowledge platform. It supports features like Live Chat and customer surveys that help reduce support calls and surface crucial feedback from your readers. 

Create Better IT Documentation With Scribe

Your IT documentation establishes consistency, efficiency and seamless collaboration. Prioritizing your documentation will quickly benefit your daily operations, and using the right tools is the best way to maximize those advantages.

With Scribe, your team can leverage powerful features like AI-generated titles and descriptions, automatic sensitive information redaction and viewer insights. To learn more about how Scribe can help your team create documentation, sign up for a demo of Scribe Enterprise.