Measuring the Impact Documentation has on Your Business

Building a productive documentation culture requires more than just warm, fuzzy vibes. It also requires cold, hard numbers. While everyone on your team may be aware that IT Glue can improve efficiency, at least in theory, to get continued buy-in from your staff and management you need to show that documentation has a positive impact on your business.

Start measuring key documentation metrics, such as documents created and documents viewed, and then assess their impact on KPIs like service desk efficiency. This way, you can draw correlations between the two data sets and measure the impact documentation has on your business performance.

Now let’s delve a little deeper.

Key Documentation Metrics and How to Track Them 

First off, you need to understand the metrics that need to be tracked. These are pretty straightforward: Documents Created, Documents Updated, Documents Viewed and Documents Deleted. These four metrics combined should give you an overall picture of your organization’s documentation maturity and provide insights into how your team uses these documents.

Documents Created  

It measures the total number of new documents added to IT Glue by an employee in a given time frame.

Documents Updated     

This metric tracks the number of documents that were modified or updated by an employee in a given time frame.

Documents Viewed    

This documentation metric counts the total number of documents viewed by an employee in a particular timescale.

Documents Deleted    

A count of the overall number of documents that an employee removed from IT Glue during a particular time frame.

If you don’t document, there will be no numbers to track. So, after you deploy IT Glue, get your team to document a client’s complete IT infrastructure, SOPs and processes, among other things. Then, replicate the same with another client.

You can track all the metrics listed above using the IT Glue-CrewHu integration. Since documentation can be a dull activity for beginners, you may face resistance from your team. In that case, use the same integration to gamify documentation. Run contests to recognize and reward top performers. It will act as an extrinsic motivator and also leverage your team’s competitive spirit.

Once you have enough data, the next step is to tie it to your business performance.

How to measure the impact of documentation metrics on your KPIs 

Now that you have insights into how your team is interacting with documentation, find out how it impacts KPIs such as First Call Resolution Rate, Lost Business Hours and Average Handle Time, among others.

For instance, evaluate whether Documents Viewed positively correlates with First Call Resolution Rate and if Documents Created has an inverse relationship with Lost Business Hours. Ideally, that should be the case since research has shown that workers tend to spend:

• Nearly seven hours a week gathering information

• Nearly six hours a week reviewing documents

• Nearly five hours a week searching for documents

• Nearly four hours a week organizing documents

On the whole, poor documentation, or the lack thereof, could cost your company 20 percent of its productivity. If you want to find out the financial cost of poor documentation, you can use our Cost of Waste Calculator to get an idea about the costs you would incur due to time wasted and process inefficiency in your MSP.

Wrapping Up 

While tracking documentation metrics is all well and good, when you can tie it to your business performance and your cost, it is much easier to get buy-in from your management and staff.

Imagine announcing that you were able to reduce password-reset tickets by 50 percent due to better documentation capabilities, especially when each password-reset ticket takes 3.5 minutes to fix and the total annual cost of such tickets is approximately $9,350.

Not only does that level of insight really drive home the value of documentation, it also helps you set clear documentation benchmarks for your business.

Want to learn more about how to use the IT Glue-CrewHu integration to measure your documentation efforts? Download this eBook now.

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