RE: taking too long

Subject: RE: taking too long
From: "William Turner" <whturner -at- earthlink -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2002 14:7:18 -0700


Genevieve, as Andrew Dugas recommended, you need a documentation plan. The
plan should detail the scope of work, ideally with book outlines, and
contain a schedule that includes interim review dates (the reviewers of
your documentation should include time in their plans to review your
documentation during the time that you specify). Just as you should have
the chance to sign off on the engineering plans, the rest of the
cross-functional team should review and sign off on your documentation
plan. This is not simply CYA; cross-functional signoffs ensure that
everyone is pulling on the oars in the same direction at the same rate.

Not to hijack this thread, but the reason that I responded here is that
writers who are ignorant of this planning process make life difficult for
all writers, because, as Genevieve's boss apparently demonstrates, there is
a tendency among those in other disciplines to underestimate the difficulty
of producing good documentation.

There seems to be a general ignorance of how writers get the information
that they put in the documentation. Part of the problem is that engineers
typically think that their designs are so elegant that their products need
no documentation. They think that if documentation is required to satisfy
Marketing, the writer should be able to figure out what to write by using
the finished product.

I recently interviewed for a TW job where this was exactly how the
development process worked. The writer was expected to wait until the
software that she was documenting was complete - no engineering specs - and
then figure out how the software worked by playing with it. She was
expected to write a rough draft based on her guesses, submit the
documentation for review, and then make the recommended changes over the
weekend before the ship date.

--Will Turner




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