Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1426508
26 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2021 Feature Article by Tamara Jovanovic HAPPIEST BABY One of my biggest nightmares involves get- ting a call from my boss over the weekend; there's a problem and they need documenta- tion that I manage, but they can't find it on our shared drive. As someone who is responsible for the files and documents related to electrical work, I always want to make sure that all the data I manage is accessible to my team and cowork- ers. If they need to look at anything I'm work- ing on, they'll know exactly where to find it. It goes without saying that my teammates should always be able to find what they are looking for at any point in time. At a small company, it's important to have rules and guidelines about managing docu- mentation. I'm sure bigger companies have full-time employees who oversee PLM sys- tems and make sure every piece of work is doc- umented in a clean and comprehensive way. In a startup environment, though, this type of work usually falls on engineers and the tech- nologists doing the actual testing. On top of our engineering tasks, we must make sure that the details of our research and testing are doc- umented. In such a fast-paced work environ- ment where new issues and tasks arise almost every day, there is always lots to do, and it is very easy to forget what was done a week ago, not to mention a month or a year ago. For a while, I was the only electrical engineer at my company, and I was constantly backing up my data. However, sometimes when I'm in the rush to get things done and move on to the next task, things like documentation slip through the cracks. I always reassure myself, "I did the testing, and I will remember what I did if it's needed." But we deal with so many tasks that it is impossible to keep it all in my head. e information is in there somewhere, for sure, but no human can remember every detail of everything they've ever done, unless they have a photographic memory. Even then, a photographic memory is no use to team mem- bers looking for that previous revision. For instance, recently I was working on some EMI issues with one of my set-ups. We Manage Your Data and Document Everything