Documents Start With Templates

We once required design documents, and the output varied wildly: three pages of background in one, two diagrams in another. The issue was not willingness but the lack of a shared structure. So we wrote templates.

Three templates we use

Design template: background and goals, option comparison, chosen approach, risks and fallbacks, rollout steps. Risks are mandatory so docs do not only sell benefits.

Incident template: timeline, impact, direct cause, root cause, improvements with owners and deadlines.

Handover template: system overview, architecture diagram, key decisions, common failures, deploy and rollback steps.

How to use them

Sections can be trimmed but not skipped. If a section truly does not apply, say so in one line.

Templates evolve. Anyone who finds a section awkward while writing can propose a change for next month.

Templates sit at the top of the knowledge base and new documents are copied from them, never started blank.

A template is not bureaucracy. It fixes what the team already figured out, so the next document starts from a better place.