We tend not to know the value of something until it’s gone, and that’s especially true for documentation. But how much does a lack of documentation really cost?

Let’s say that a given organization has eight new workers across all its departments. For the first three months of work, I estimate anywhere between 25-50% of those workers’ billable hours will be spent acclimating to existing systems and procedures and preparing their work environments for development. At an average rate of $45 per hour, that comes to a cost of $43,200 – $86,400 spent on acclimation in those first three months — and that’s that’s just for the new hires. Across all departments and systems, how many hours will the Operations & Maintenance teams spend working with systems each year? What about during a crisis? If there’s limited, inaccurate, or, even worse, no documentation, how many thousands of additional hours are being spent on getting up-to-speed across any given organization each year? In a small organization with 10 employees, roughly $45,000 will be lost each year due to a lack of documentation, and that scales upwards: without sufficient documentation, an organization with 100 employees will lose $450,000 per year; one with 1000 employees will lose $4,500,000 per year, and one with 3000 employees will lose $13,500,000 per year.

While cutting costs on documentation sounds at first like it’s trimming the fat, the reality is that a lack of documentation will slowly bleed an organization dry.

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