See, from my point of view its the Brits that overkill our documents . Recently a document that for one of our US customers would have been around 100 pages jumped to over 400 pages due to the level of detail that that client wanted within the document.

Though, saying its a British thing is incorrect as well, its more of a corporate thing. The larger the company "wants to be" the more they bloat a document to make it look important. Large companies that know they are large typically want the smallest document they can get their hands on . MS is a perfect example, too many times I've been told "can we shorten this at all?"

So, no offense taken on any comments. In fact, I did my best to get the doc down to the least amount of sections for the broadest audience I could. Thus it should be very customizable. There are sections that I (personally) feel should be in all design documents, while others will say that they aren't necessary.