We are tought at the university to document everything. Most of the big companies with smooth businwss-processes do document every aspect of their life obligatory. But they more rely on words in small and even avarage companies…Personally I trust paper much more than speech. But I’ve faced an absolute rejection of internal paper work by the boss at my job. They even rejected a neat requirements specification for our IT contractors. It would be better to say everything rather than write, they told me.
The high extent of documenting processes, including the communication one, is natural at large companies. And the reason is that people often understand same words differently. More than that, a person tend not to mention much details, important details, in conversation. When employees document their ideas several problems are to be solved:
- The author has to put his thoughts in some framework, which make it easier to understand the information.
- It’s easier to see week sides of the idea when it’s being written down. Sometimes I saw my idea was foolish, just when I came to describe it on the paper.
- It’s easier to comment what is written. You can criticize not the whole idea, but only the key parts of it. So the idea may be worked out better in a shorter period.
- It’s easier to read the main parts of the idea for a new person, getting familiar with the idea. Of course, if they were formulated well.
Even though it takes more time to document an idea than to just discuss it, the futher consumtion of time may be reduced by fewer corrections to be made.
For example, when the manager described for a programmist what data he wanted to see in a new report, he couldn’t imagine it could be understood wrong. So, the programmer did implement everything the manager wanted in the report, but he couldn’t care less about its presentation, the report had a lot of excessive information. The manager though the task wasn’t done, and the programmer had no idea what he did wrong. To solve the issue I had to write down the description of the project which was revised by both sides of the confrontation. Soon everybody was satisfied. And everything I had to do was watching the devellopment goes according to the plan.
Illustration1. A chart illustrating the time spent on the documented and non-documented projects implementation
Therefore we can compare documentation with delegation of powers. A bit more time should be spent on describing the project in the beginning, not to spend time on correcting what was done (see Illustration 1).
Though you should keep in mind the ratio of time spent on descriptions and time on corrections. If, theoretically, time spent on writing descriptions is more than time spent on correcting the mistakes, it’s better to discuss everything in words. For example, if you need to hang a calendar in your office, there’s no need in writing the project 
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