The Importance of Document Templates
Posted on 11. Aug, 2009 by Jeremy in Burning or Building, Business Efficiency, Documentation & Training, Writing & Marketing
Try to imagine a house built without an architect. Now try envisioning a startup business without a business model. Lastly, try imagining a filling line or packaging center running smoothly without operating procedures or processes written, approved, and in place. What is each of these scenarios missing? Planning. Without someone drafting ideas and finalizing clear, written plans, nearly everything becomes impossible.
Documenting plans, procedures, instructions, scientific findings, tests, or simply ideas is crucial to a job well done. The way to ensure that documentation is valuable and correct every time is by designing and using templates. A document template acts as an outline to follow when developing or documenting just about anything. A good template provides many benefits, including:
- Consistency
A template ensures the same points and details are related every time. There’s no need to worry about missing information or what was done or not done previously. - Clarity
Templates remove the guesswork from documentation. Because information and details are outlined for the user, the purpose of the document is clear and concise, streamlining the documentation process. - Form
Rather than reviewing plans or procedures that all look different and contain information in varying order, templates allow for a consistency of form that enables users to know where to find what they’re looking for in every document. - Completeness
Templates ensure that all necessary information is included in a document. Each time the template is used, specific details are required to fill in the page. This makes it hard to erroneously leave something out - Efficiency
Instead of rewriting entire documents each time they’re needed, templates enable a document to be created once and then reused over and over again. The only difference from document to document is the specific information being provided. This saves valuable time and money, because employees no longer have to reinvent the wheel when they work. All they have to do is open the template and start providing the required information.
Templates help make documentation manageable, reliable, and effective, and they do so through planning. By designing a template that fulfills all of the desired needs when documenting a process, procedure, test script, or anything else, a business can realize great savings on resources. And the business itself will run a lot more smoothly.
Simplify documentation by using templates. After all, a house can be built without an architect, but would you want to live in it?
