Well one day you might find yourselves in a project where documentation is the focus. Where every last thing you do needs to be documented. Yes, you might find that old adage come true “Be careful what you wish for, it might come true!”.

Yes folks, there is such a thing as too much documentation. From all my time in industry, I have to say based on my experience, IT projects are best served by striking a nice middle ground for documentation. Enough that you can reference things and figure out what’s going on, but not so much that you are getting mired down in 99% documentation and 1% actual work.

You see if you’re not careful of this, that is one way projects might fail. Many a project has failed because there was too much paperwork, but no actual work was ever done. The project is seen as a failure and then cancelled, doomed forever to the IT graveyard of projects. At the following link you will find a humourous account of too much documentation.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TooMuchDocumentation

-RP