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Technical Documentation Maturity Model

Info

This is an excerpt of a sample Technical Documentation Maturity Model that internal documentation teams would use to drive documentation excellence.

Overview

This page documents the organization's Technical Documentation Maturity Model (TDMM) that is intended to:

  • Guide assessments that determine the level of documentation support at the organization level.
  • Guide assessments about the processes used to produce technical documentation.
  • Guide assessments about the quality of content across products.

The TDMM uses a metric-based approach to assessing documentation and implementing changes to documentation standards, processes, and content. It is designed to focus on three levels of assessments:

  • Organization level - focuses on the organization's overall approach and view of technical documentation.
  • Product level - focuses on the product teams' collection and implementation of their product documentation.
  • Content level - focuses on the usefulness of content across individual documents, articles, and wiki pages.

The assessment results for each of these levels are combined to determine the overall maturity of the technical documentation across the organization and is categorized as:

  • Level 0 - Ad-hoc
  • Level 1 - Rudimentary
  • Level 2 - Basic
  • Level 3 - Defined
  • Level 4 - Managed
  • Level 5 - Optimized

Each of these categories are explained later in this document.

What is a TDMM?

Maturity is the qualitative measurement if an organization's ability to review existing process and identify opportunities for improvement. A Maturity Model is a framework used to qualitatively apply the maturity measurement to a specific subject area or process. Therefore, the TDDM's primary goal is to assess the quality of technical documentation intended for users to gain product understanding/ The technical documentation is comprised of two main components: process and deliverable. The process includes the method or methods used to request, create, and deliver documentation. The deliverable is the result of the process which is current and correct documentation. The TDMM includes assessments for both process and deliverable.