Business Problem
A Project’s time and efforts can be innovative,valiant, and extremely impactful to your organization. But if those efforts are not backed up by the technical documentation required to paint the before and after picture of your implementation, maintaining the success of the project is difficult. That is why technical documentation is so important. Technical documentation serves as the compass for developers, project managers, and end-users alike, technical documentation stands as a comprehensive repository of knowledge, unraveling the intricacies of your project with clarity and precision.
This project was a supplemental effort to a process modernization effort for a client. We moved a data batch processing workflow from an on-prem windows task scheduler setup to AWS lambda and API gateway. In the midst of this move we also documented the entire process end to end. These efforts included:
Setting up a documentation site published to a public url so all business users could access the content. Enhancing the site content with working search functionality so users could quickly find what they needed. Writing minimalistic, professional quality documentation, which is well organized and provides the right context and example content to quickly illustrate key ideas with minimal user effort.
Solutions Used
- Docusarus
- Markdown
- Lucid Chart
- Amazon Neptune
- AWS Config
Project Details
This project took a business critical batch processing job which was scheduled to run on an on-prem server via windows task scheduler and modernized it for AWS lambda. A critical part of the project implementation was to document the configurable aspects of the implementation. Documentation efforts also covered:
- Process workflow architecture
- Infrastructure architecture overviews
- What each piece of infrastructure does
- How to configure and send requests to the new endpoints
- How to monitor and see job progress
- How to start and stop a executing process
Impact and Results
The results of the documentation efforts for this project were an increased knowledge base across all employees of the process and how to use it. Previously the legacy process was completely undocumented, this lead to only a handful of employees who can troubleshoot or knew where to look when issues arose. Now anyone can learn the process in under 1 hour by reviewing the documentation. We also implemented an easy to use documentation framework know as Docusarus and trained the users how to provide updates to the documentation as the process evolves.