Learning to document..hmmm...no...communicate

We document something or the other everyday. 

We document for "formality" purposes. 

We document to "save our asses". 

We document for "milestone deliverable" purposes (payments would be dependent on it).

But how many times have we documented to communicate?

Every time, I compose a design or an architecture document, it starts on a good note. I enter the "table of contents", with a lot of thought and structure and then as the documentation progresses, the interest wanes. The objective starts with "communicating the design" and then finishes with "documenting the design". A more deeper thought on it revealed that when I start documenting, I start with documentation, not communication...High level design documentation, low level documentation, support manual documentation, etc...These are all boring words to anybody. Who cares to read the disclosures? Who cares to read the "Conditions apply?". Because these are all documents. Their primary purpose is to save themselves and not to communicate something to their customers. That's why they are a failure..

Now documentation is a boring word...I researched the two keywords - documentation & communication on Google's Ngram Viewer and this was the graph...

(Communication vs documentation)

It is a nice comparison between the 2 words. One basic inference is that "communication" has been in use for a long time. Documentation seems to be a word of the post-40s. And communication has been used in a lot of books compared to documentation, illustrating the fact that its communication you would want to do rather than documentation in your projects.

Once you start thinking in terms of communication, your whole perspective towards composing any kind of artifact changes. You would want to communicate your design process, challenges you faced, your solution, benefits and drawbacks. Its like selling your design process. This will free you from MS Word documents. It can be a simple presentation or a movie or an audio file too or just a diagram.

Documentation..hmmm...no...Communication is an art..Its one of those pieces when done right, the satisfaction is fulfilling. Ask the book writers and scholars.