Ticketing Systems and Documenting Your Work

Have you ever worked hard on something that had a lot of steps and took a long time only to have to do it again three months later and completely forgotten everything you did? Well that happens all the time in the IT world. That's why it's important to document the work you do. Documentation might seem like a time suck but it's a total timesaver. The first it's your ticketing or bug system, tickets are common way of documenting an issue. Bugs are issues with the system that weren't caused by an external source. Imagine if every every time something broke you received an email, that be hard to keep track of and not scalable at all. The IT industry utilizes systems just to keep track of this for you. Some examples are Bugzilla, JIRA and Redmine. These are all in one solutions that help you track user issues, communicate with your users and provide updates. A great way to use the system for documentation is to update the ticket with what the issue is. The steps and procedures you're trying to resolve and the solution you arrived at. This is important for two reasons. The first is that it keeps the user in the loop. The second is that it helps you audit your steps in case you need to go back and see what you did. You can also write down procedures and policies to create a documentation trail. You have a lot of options of where you want to write and store your documentation. You can keep your policies and procedures in a document, web page through online file storage or lots of other mediums. Just make sure it's accessible to everyone else in your company. If you have a monthly reoccurring tasks like updating old software machines, make sure to write down all the steps and then refer back to them when it's needed. Documentation isn't a set it and forget it situation. Systems and processes are constantly changing, and so should your documentation. It's important to update documentation so that you aren't reading something that's old. One last thing I want to call out about writing documentation is that you don't need to get creative with your writing. You aren't writing a short story, you're writing a technical document. You want to be as concise as possible so that when someone reads your document, they can easily figure out what they need to do.
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