Make Business and IT Leadership Accountable for Application Documentation

This chapter explains why business and IT leadership hold the highest accountability for Application Documentation, and how that accountability should be exercised.

Why Leadership Holds the Highest Accountability

Application Managers and their teams produce Application Documentation, but they do not decide how much schedule pressure the enterprise applies, what is funded, or which risks are accepted. Leadership does. When leadership rewards on-time delivery and never asks about documentation, teams rationally sacrifice documentation. Documentation therefore succeeds or fails according to what leadership demands and tolerates.

No business leader should allow IT to deploy an Application into the business’s Production environment without complete and vetted documentation. No IT leader should allow any Application into the business’s Production environment without it either. Each side is a check on the other.

Establish Leadership Accountability

Make leadership accountability concrete:

• Make documentation conformance a leadership measure. Include Application documentation conformance in the measures business and IT leaders review and are reviewed against.

• Review conformance regularly. Have leaders regularly review the enterprise’s documentation conformance reporting, described in the chapter “Track Application Documentation Conformance with Red-Amber-Green (RAG) Reporting.”

• Fund documentation. Ensure that Application budgets and schedules include the time and effort needed to document properly.

• Personally own exceptions. Ensure that exceptions to the policy are approved at an appropriately senior level, so that accepting the risk is a conscious leadership decision.

Document and Share Leadership Accountability

Record, in the policy itself, which business and IT leaders are accountable for it, and publish conformance results to them on a regular schedule.

Best Practice: Hold Business and IT Leadership Jointly Accountable for Application Documentation

It is a best practice to both establish and document the solution for documentation accountability at the top of the enterprise: make business and IT leaders jointly accountable for Application documentation conformance, give them regular visibility of it, require that they fund it, and ensure that exceptions are approved at a senior leadership level.

Benefits: When leaders are measured on documentation, they create the conditions for it to be done: realistic schedules, adequate funding, and support for teams that hold the line. Joint accountability also prevents each side from blaming the other for undocumented Applications that both allowed into Production.

Connections to Related IF4IT Practices and Inventories

The Application Portfolio Management (APM) Best Practices addresses how IT leadership governs the Application Portfolio. The Service Management Best Practices addresses accountability for the services Applications support.