> My current employer was sold to me as a "high documentation" place. What it means in practice is that if you're trying to do something there are 5 outdated documents describing the decision making process for how the project was run, and no documents about how to actually use the resulting software.
How is this not inevitable if your goal is to always write things down? It seems like the way for document to be accurate is to keep the scope small and if you want everything in scope then it's going to contain a lot of outdated information.
You basically need to deprecate and eventually probably take offline outdated docs. There's something to be said for the historical record but if it's indexed--and if it's not no one will probably find it--it's going to compete with current documentation for search.
Large organizations in many sectors employ professional records managers for this reason (and many others). Every record has a “lifecycle” and it is deprecated and discarded after that.
How is this not inevitable if your goal is to always write things down? It seems like the way for document to be accurate is to keep the scope small and if you want everything in scope then it's going to contain a lot of outdated information.