In the day-to-day commotion, it’s easy and common to neglect documentation that reflects Current State. In an environment nervous about job security, incentives exist to retain tribal knowledge and avoid documenting Current State.

However, in a healthy environment, and when your organization is ready to innovate, documentation about the Current State makes your life easier. You need to decide to 1) collect existing documentation, 2) create new documentation about Current State, or 3) both. Documentation may or may not be described as process-oriented. You can limit the documentation to what you feel 1) contributes to innovation decisions or 2) would change as a result of innovation. Below is one way to inventory all Current State documentation you might collect or build.

Some of the fields in the table above deserve some elaboration.

Type — state whether the document is process-oriented, data-oriented, both, unsure, or neither; i.e. just a document that describes something worthwhile about Current State

Format — might include PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Visio, or Does Not Exist Yet

Frequency (if applicable) — any of these might apply:  Continual, Haphazard, Firefighting, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Annually, No Set Frequency, Unsure

Room for Improvement — High, Medium, Low, or Zero

Cost of Delay — Combining Effort/Cost, Importance, Urgency into one value in order to prioritize

A Current State Inventory is a primitive, preliminary version of the User Story Inventory. Ideally, you can complete a Current State inventory before being under time pressures of an actual project schedule.

Upstream Assets: None

Downstream Assets: Current State Scripts, Current State Process Flows, Change Log, BRIQ Log/Parking Lot