Types of internal documentation

Last updated: 2024-08-13
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What is internal documentation?

Internal documentation is a structured collection of your company’s policies, procedures, processes, guidelines, and best practices, accumulated knowledge and expertise, training materials and so on created by the organization for its needs that people in the organization can use as a reference to get their work done.

Basic types of internal company documentation

Policies, procedures and process documentation

Policies and procedures such as.

  • Employee handbook
  • Onboarding procedure
  • Offboarding procedure
  • Employee policies
  • Security policies
  • Compliance information
  • QA testing policies

Training and employee development documentation

Training and employee documentation provides any content important for the development of employees such as

  • Training materials
  • Employee development plan
  • Training checklists
  • Performance reviews

Project documentation

Project documentation relates to all the internal documents created over the course of a project such as

  • Business case or project idea
  • Project plan, project risk analysis
  • Project schedule or timeline
  • Project meeting minutes
  • Project status report or tracking
  • Project closure document or project summary, lessons learned

Operational and team collaboration documentation

Operational documentation essential for day-to-day operations such as: 

  • Operational plans
  • Team schedules
  • Status reports
  • Team meeting minutes 
  • Department meeting minutes

Technical documentation, product or service knowledge 

Technical documentation is any document related to your product or service. 

  • Source code
  • Manuals
  • User documentation, Admin documentation
  • Code, style guides
  • Product requirements
  • Architecture
  • FAQs
  • Maintenance documentation
  • Product datasheet

Sales documentation

  • Proposals
  • Business cases
  • Sales meeting minutes
  • Sales activity records

What forms can internal company documentation take?

Internal company documentation is not limited to just written text and documents and can come in many different forms.

  • written internal documents
  • wikipages
  • video tutorials
  • training content 
  • diagrams
  • images, screenshots, videos, screen recordings

What are the basic types of corporate regulations and governing documents?

Company policies have a certain structure and naming that differentiates documents according to their focus and use.

The work order is a special type of internal regulation. It elaborates the rules of the Labor Code and other legal regulations according to the special conditions of the employer

  • Company policy is a document containing a statement, a declaration of a company to behave or act in a certain way. It is a relatively broad document. Examples are Security Policy, Quality Policy and the like.
  • Company procedureswork procedures or guidelines are comprehensive concrete instructions, rules that shape processes and provide a framework for everyday activities.
  • Manuals are detailed instructions, typically for a specific process or activity. It is a detailed list of steps that workers must perform in a given process
  • Company standard is a document or a set of documents describing a requirement for the behavior or characteristics of a person, product, or service that describes a desired state or behavior.