Is documenting everything absolutely necessary?
FitSM - Lightweight IT Service Management Standard
The FitSM standard aims to be very lightweight in its requirements and application. Still, it remains a management standard, and those tend to be very keen on one dubiously popular task: documentation.
We all know that information must be recorded, but few of us are very enthusiastic about it. Too often we have found ourselves writing a report that we fear nobody will ever read. Yet when things go wrong, documents and records are crucial.
Only record the information you will need
The approach of FitSM is that you should record information that you will need to have available, and only this. If it won’t be read in future, it isn’t worth your time. Early drafts of FitSM listed a larger number of required documents, but this was replaced in many cases by a specific phrase: in a consistent manner.
Consistency over documentation
So why consistency over documentation? Documentation is often seen as the gold standard for achieving a repeatable and effective service. However, our experience in a wide range of organisations is that just because something is documented, doesn’t mean that people are aware of, let alone follow whatever the documentation says. In the end, the document itself has no value, outside of it holding some key data or supporting some use and desired behaviour. In short, there is no inherent virtue in documenting a procedure, if that procedure is not followed.
FitSM - In support of providing services to customers
The reason one might want to document a procedure is so the activity it describes achieves its goals and does so consistently time after time. The consistency is the key factor, not the documentation. In fact, if an activity is performed consistently, and meets its goals, then it is likely that documenting it is of lower priority than other tasks within the Service Management System. Ultimately, documentation will be required, but it makes much more sense once the activity itself works well.
Because of this, FitSM-1 will generally say that in order to meet a requirement, the activity described must be carried out in a consistent manner. This does not mean they never need to be documented. According to the maturity and capability model in FitSM-6, typically documentation will be required to meet a requirement at a higher maturity level, but not at a lower one, but the key remains to repeatedly achieve a set of goals, in support of providing services to customers.
