It’s a simple question: "What is this document trying to say and to whom?"
I regularly ask this question to myself as I’m reviewing documents.
Most of these documents have followed a template which has been defined through a methodology. Much of the time people have written a document that fulfils what the methodology requires, but fails to communicate the story.
They’ve missed that the fundamental part of any decent methodology is that the document template is there to assist in telling you what the framework of the story needs to be. the methodology is rarely any good at telling you what the story is.
We should all regard ourselves as story tellers.
Without the story we aren’t communicating, if we aren’t communicating then we aren’t adding and value, if we aren’t adding any value then we ought to change so that we are.
(This is also one of the reasons why I dislike long lists of things in tables. They might be full of information, but they don’t tell a story)
Graham Chastney 