Necessity of doc plans for a single chapter or section?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

The redundant-sounding "tekWriter tekWriter" wonders: <<I would like to know
whether or not it is typical to create a complete doc plan for a single
chapter or even a sub-section of a chapter. For example, if I had to doc a
new feature that needed to be added to an existing guide or manual.>>

It really depends what you define as a "doc plan". For a relatively small
job like this, I create an outline and a list of any dependencies (e.g.,
"I'll need to talk to X to get the facts on Y", "I can't begin documenting B
until A is complete"), then get the person responsible for the thing I'm
documenting to do a reality check on what I've written. If there aren't any
particular dependencies, and the job is plain vanilla (e.g., "do exactly
what I did for the other 1700 topics"), I don't even need to talk to the
person before submitting my writeup. That's the extent of my doc plan. The
larger and more complex the job, and the more people who are involved, the
more likely it is that you'll need to do more planning and develop something
approaching a full documentation plan.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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