I would worry a lot more about a process that keeps the design documentation in sync with the code and systems than the form it takes.<p>Design documentation violates the Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) rule and how often have you seen it, especially at the fine grained level of UML, keep up with the code instead of being abandoned early in the process?<p>So maybe you should look at round-trip tools, or methods to automatically generate documentation from easy (enough) to maintain in your code stuff (Javadoc is one well known low level example of this).<p>Or keep it so simple it won't be a burden to keep up to date, but then you're probably not talking an all-in UML approach.