Capturing what you did and decided as it happens, so others can reproduce the work and use it as evidence.
Documentation is the work of turning what you did and decided into a record. It is not the same as polishing prose. What sets a record's worth is whether you wrote it while the work was happening, who wrote it, and whether the original and its edit history survive. It starts with your own work log, grows into a system that gets a team recording, and ends in organizational policy that holds up under outside scrutiny. This guide covers the act of recording. It does not cover sentence-level craft or the filing and retention of finished documents.
Recording isn't a habit yet. You write down what happened in meetings and work, and what got decided, before the day ends. Every record carries an author and a date, so anyone can later tell who wrote it and when. Readers and format don't matter at this stage. The bar is simple: months later you reread your own note and the situation comes back.
What Comes Next
If you've checked off most of this list, you're ready for Lv.2, the Reproducible Records stage, where you leave procedures others can follow. Roediger & Karpicke(2006) found retrieval practice beats rereading for retention, so a record proves its worth when it's read again, not when it's written. For 2 weeks, write in 5-minute bursts as you work instead of batching at the end. Then recall a 3-month-old situation before opening the record and see what memory was filling in.
The INCA skill is defined across SFIA responsibility levels 1 to 6 (contributing under direction, drafting, producing accurate information products, designing complex outputs with quality control, leading team editing, setting organizational policy), making it the primary basis for level boundaries.
Requirements in 7.5.2 (identification and description, format, review and approval when creating or updating) and 7.5.3 (control) give checklist items their concrete basis. The standard applies regardless of organization size or industry, so it carries no domain bias.
Defines record integrity (attributability, contemporaneity, originality, and more) as an international regulatory standard. It anchors the claim that documentation means leaving trustworthy records rather than writing that reads well.
Guidance that sets out the core elements of record governance shared across every field, drawn from fundamental failures that regulators in several countries found repeatedly during inspections. It grounds the L4 record control and L6 organizational policy items.
Research showing that retrieval practice strengthens long-term retention more than repeated reading (Psychological Science, vol. 17, pp. 249-255). It supports the premise that a record proves its worth when reread, the L1 record recovery item, and the training prescriptions in the transition hints.
