What would we do without document templates?

[Mich the Tester]

There's a chappy here called a "Quality and Process Manager" who spends his days making and maintaining all sorts of document templates. There is a template for almost everything except e-mails, but now he is working to correct this; he is creating a standard e-mail template for all internal e-mails and another one for all external e-mails.

Now believe it or not, I went to school, and I think I'm capable of writing a document that includes title, author, date and introduction and even some content. I'd give myself a 7/10 for this particular skill; I'm not a budding Shakespeare and from time to time I might make some grammatical errors, but I think that on the whole I can make documents that are reasonably useful and presentable.

Given that I'm working with other people who've been to school, I'm a bit skeptical about the need for these templates which force the user to spend hours filling in all sorts of mandatory paragraphs and headers and sub-headers, and I remember a time when documents were made without the use of templates. Maybe I'm just an , but I wonder; do you consider yourself capable of writing documents from scratch?

[SimonMac]

I just stick everything on my LtdCo's template which may or may not have been recycled from work presented to old Clients

[vetran]

Given that I'm working with other people who've been to school, I'm a bit skeptical about the need for these templates which force the user to spend hours filling in all sorts of mandatory paragraphs and headers and sub-headers, and I remember a time when documents were made without the use of templates. Maybe I'm just an , but I wonder; do you consider yourself capable of writing documents from scratch?

You would be surprised. I think many people turn their brain off at the door.

[Halo Jones]

Templates have their place, I use many of them – admittedly these tend to be contractual & actual contracts, but for emails & the like I want to say over kill & decry the nanny state but having seen some of the emails sent from site I can see a need, as ever its working to the lowest common denominator

[DirtyDog]

If the client follows a methodology, then you would expect the documentation to be in a common format.

Nearly all the clients I've worked with have followed Oracle's AIM standard - and even those that use their own formats still refer to the documents with the same names.

[doodab]

do you consider yourself capable of writing documents from scratch?

Yes, and sometimes they are so good I get asked to turn them into templates. This has resulted in me trying less hard.

[Mich the Tester]

You would be surprised. I think many people turn their brain off at the door.

Templates have their place, I use many of them – admittedly these tend to be contractual & actual contracts, but for emails & the like I want to say over kill & decry the nanny state but having seen some of the emails sent from site I can see a need, as ever its working to the lowest common denominator

Indeed, but these problems are surely rooted in employing the wrong people; is it really such a good idea to inhibit the creativity of, and waste the time of good people?

[vetran]

Templates have their place, I use many of them – admittedly these tend to be contractual & actual contracts, but for emails & the like I want to say over kill & decry the nanny state but having seen some of the emails sent from site I can see a need, as ever its working to the lowest common denominator

yes senior people using graph paper etc stationary

[CheeseSlice]

templates for structured and complex documents - Yes, this is a sensible way to stick to agreed standards or just to produce consistent quality documents. If you're really good with them you can make the top level heading numbers and titles consistent between similar documents so its easier for the reader to find stuff quickly.

templates for e-mails - sounds like somebody has run out of work to do and is trying to avoid early termination of contract

[Dallas]

You would be surprised. I think many people turn their brain off at the door.

Yep, I got a report this morning that a permie styled themselves: black text on a navy blue background

he needs a template