Write documentation you can use

People often associate Quality with documentation. To some extent, this is unavoidable: you need a written record of inputs and outputs to make sure they both match the requirements, for example. But it's also partly because of the enormous influence of ISO 9001, which—especially in its earlier editions—stated a number of specific documentation requirements.

In principle the association isn't a bad thing. Documentation is incredibly useful. The problem comes when companies start documenting things without regard to whether someone is going to use the documentation later. Pro tip: If nobody is ever going to read it, then writing it down might have been a waste of time.* By the same token, if you write something down it is only considerate to think about who is going to read it, and what it will take for your writing to be useful.

One of the best examples I ever saw for the latter point was implemented by a contract-manufacturing company my firm used to do business with. They were a small company, but they had carved out a specialty niche in the larger ecosystem of manufacturing for the high-tech market. Because they were a small company, they had only a few large machines and the rest of their product assembly was done by hand. This meant that each workstation along their assembly line needed work instructions, to tell the people there what to do.

Manufacturing work instructions can be handled in a lot of different ways. This company started with the drawings we gave them, along with all of our assembly notes, but then wrote their own instructions based on them. 

• Their manufacturing engineer wrote one document per workstation, so the people at Workstation 2 wouldn't get distracted by instructions for Workstation 3.
• Since most employees had a native language other than English, each document was bilingual in English and the other language.
• Each document included a photograph showing what the product was supposed to look like when it came into that workstation, and then when it left.
• After their manufacturing engineer generated this series of documents (based on our drawing), he sat down with his contact on our side to review the whole stack of them, to clarify any confusing points, and to get our approval.
• And of course these documents were kept under strict version control.  

Ironically, this company was not certified to ISO 9001. They had investigated what certification would require, and concluded that they already had plenty of business and didn't need it. They were also the only supplier of ours that never once caused us a serious problem! (I allude to them briefly in this post here.)

But they understood what they needed in order to do excellent manufacturing in their specific industry niche. So they focused on that, ignored distractions that didn't matter to them or weren't useful, and turned out flawless work. Every time. 

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* Of course there are exceptions. If I write something down, the very act of writing also helps me remember it. That's why I said "might have been."