Optimal documentation
useful, up to date and convenient
A practical guide to IT documentation best practices for business analysts, systems analysts, product managers, and project leads.
Optimal documentation is not about doing more — it’s about doing it smarter. Optimize your IT documentation without overcomplicating it.
This book is for IT analysts, product managers, and project leads who want to create documentation that is clear, practical, and genuinely useful.
- Make documentation support real decisions and collaboration
- Keep documents up to date in fast-changing environments
- Choose the right content, structure, and tools — without overdoing it
Key topics
Optimal documentation: useful, up-to-date, and convenient is a practical handbook for anyone responsible for creating or managing documentation. The book is structured into five parts, guiding you step-by-step through making documentation genuinely useful and sustainable in real projects.
1. Useful
- Why people resist documenting and how to counter common myths
- How documentation benefits you
- Organizational value of proper documentation
2. Optimal
- Different documentation content types
- How to make documentation understandable and usable
- Defining what “sufficient documentation” means in your context
3. Up to Date
- Why documentation gets out of date in the first place
- AS-IS, TO-BE, and workflow documentation — how to manage it
- Aligning documentation with agile work processes
4. Convenient
- Organizing shared documentation repositories
- Structuring AS-IS, TO-BE, and workflow documents
- Choosing tools and using AI in documentation workflows
5. Your documentation
- How to start documenting if there’s nothing in place
- Integrating documentation into daily work
- Creating a team-specific documentation guide
Exercises & Templates
- Step-by-step exercises
- A documentation kickoff checklist
- Example combined documentation structure
- and more
How to document IT projects effectively
This book focuses on IT documentation best practices that actually work in real projects — especially in agile environments where requirements, systems, and teams constantly change.
What problems does it solve?
- Uncertainty about how much documentation is enough
- Teams that don’t read, trust, or maintain existing documentation
- Documentation that becomes outdated immediately after delivery
- Writing documentation that feels like wasted effort
- Missing or inconsistent software documentation
- Difficulty keeping documentation up to date in agile documentation processes
- Unstructured, hard-to-navigate documentation repositories
- Documentation that does not meet regulatory or audit requirements
Who this book is for?
- Business analysts and systems analysts
- Product managers and product owners
- Project managers and delivery leads
- Anyone responsible for documentation for IT systems
IT documentation best practices you’ll learn
You’ll learn how to:
- apply documentation best practices consistently across teams
- document IT projects in a way that supports real decision-making
- use documentation to explore problems and align solutions
- keep documentation up to date without excessive overhead
- choose the right documentation structure and tools for your context
Feedback from test readers
Test readers read an early draft of Estonian-language edition.
This book offers not just a subtle hint but real clarity: if you want your organization to succeed, you need to build a system. And building a system requires mapping key processes and creating documentation. This helps new employees, supports day-to-day understanding of the details, and makes it easier to find root causes when something needs to be explained. In this book, you’ll find clear, accessible guidance on how to create systems and documentation in a way that truly delivers value.
Although I don’t have much experience in this field, I still found several parts that validated my own working methods. At the same time, I also got many new ideas on how to better manage my work processes in the future—like updating documentation after a release, for example. The book also reassured me that it’s perfectly okay for documentation to evolve (it doesn’t have to be perfect!) and that the analyst can decide how to present things based on the situation.
About the author
Kaja Trees is a Business and IT Systems Analyst with over 20 years of experience working at the intersection of business and technology. She has helped organizations design systems, clarify requirements, and improve collaboration across development teams in complex IT environments.
She is the founder of IT & Business Analysis Club (ITBAC), an education and consulting platform that has trained hundreds of analysts, product owners, and project managers.
Her work combines:
- hands-on project experience in large and complex organizations
- practical frameworks grounded in international standards (ISO, BPMN, UML, ArchiMate)
- a strong focus on documentation as a tool for thinking, alignment, and long-term system quality
Optimal Documentation: Useful, Up to Date and Convenient is based on real client work, Business and IT Systems Analysis course feedback, and years of refining what “just enough documentation” actually means in practice.
I don’t believe in perfect documentation. I believe in documentation that supports people, decisions, and change.
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