Sometimes Documentation is Everything

Posted by: William W. (Woody) Williams

An attention grabbing news story: Text quoted below scrapped from Fox News but same story / text available from most media outlets.

The Department of Defense and the National Nuclear Security Administration had to wait more than a year to refurbish aging nuclear warheads — partly because they had forgotten how to make a crucial component, a government report states.

Regarding a classified material codenamed "Fogbank," a Government Accountability Office report released this month states that "NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency."

Short story is: "kept few records" exacerbated by, for various reasons, no one with knowledge of the process on staff.

To recover, it took a year, a large project team, and a lot of money recreating the lost production process -- tax dollars wasted because a single file was never saved. The cost of rework decades after the fact is a lot more than the tiny cost of producing and archiving a few documents the first time through.

Not every project produces a product as critical or dangerous as a nuclear weapon. However, in this case the point concerns a production process, not the delivery of a warhead or the firing of a missile.

That undocumented production process is one we knew or should have known would be required in the future. Maintenance is an ongoing requirement in almost any system -- especially systems with expected life times in decades. "Transition to support" is a well defined process followed in every product lifecycle and always involves the sharing of maintenance knowledge.

Hairs may be split over whether or not a particular set of documents amounts to knowledge but, in this case, neither documents nor knowledge were retained. This is a grievous error in judgment and project planning.

Product and project managers, as well as their teams, take heed. Whether we refer to it as "documentation" or "knowledge management," there is a clear lesson.

There is a small upfront cost to planning and knowledge management (or documentation). It is worth it.

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