How to document IT projects?
The book Optimal Documentation – Useful, Up-to-Date, and Convenient is a practical handbook for managing IT project documentation.
The book is divided into five parts, offering a step-by-step journey through creating, managing, and updating documentation.
1. Useful
We start by building an understanding—first and foremost within ourselves—that documentation is genuinely useful.
2. Optimal
We choose the necessary documentation based on the size of the project and the needs of the documentation’s target audience. We write the documentation in a way that makes it easy to understand.
3. Up-To-Date
We take a look at our work processes and when we create and update documentation to ensure it is always up to date.
4. Convenient
We make creating, reading, and managing documentation convenient by using structure and the capabilities of available tools.
5. Practical
Finally, we’ll talk about how all these principles come together—how to actually apply what you’ve read in this book to your work.
Exercises
Most chapters end with exercises.
These are primarily intended to reinforce your knowledge—you don’t need to repeat them in every new organization, team, or project. However, they do help you put together a documentation guide tailored to your team.
Publishing
I’ve chosen the publishing house I’ll be working with to publish the book – Kuldne Lammas. I’ve seen books published with their help and found nothing to criticize. Also, at least during the proposal stage, communication with them has been very smooth and prompt.
I’ve also decided to work with EDRK for publishing the e-book. As a result, my e-book should quickly become available in the Apollo and Rahva Raamat online stores.
According to the current estimate, the e-book could be released in June and the printed book in July.
Pre-ordering
My confidence that I will actually publish this book is high enough that book presales is open!
Book status: editing based on feedback
1st draft
2nd draft
e-book
translation
Last edit 19.04.2025
editing based on feedback
19.04.2025 status
Work on the book is actively ongoing. Thanks to the detailed feedback from test readers, I’ve rewritten several chapters, added more examples and illustrations, and partially revised the book’s structure—resulting in a more comprehensive, clearer, and more practical book than originally planned.
There are still a few topics I’d like to improve further—you can definitely expect changes in the final, summary section of the book currently titled “Practical”. I’m seriously considering renaming and restructuring it to better convey my ideas. In addition, there are still a few smaller notes on my to-do list waiting to be addressed.
After that, there’s still language editing, layout, and more—everything needed to turn the Word file into a finished book.
Feedback from test readers
General part of the feedback provided by Kätlin Jürss:
I consider the book very useful for beginning analysts or companies that don’t yet have analysts and are considering creating such a role. It provides excellent insight into how analysts create and maintain documentation. It also offers a very good overview of various technological options.
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. I underlined quite a few sections (adding notes like “very good point!”) and plan to go through the book again alongside my work and start applying the practices. There’s too much information to fully absorb all at once anyway.
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.