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>I am the only technical writer in our organization and facing some
>problems when dealing with developers and QA team. They have their
>predefined ways of doing things and so do not give ear to what I say
>concerning documentation.
I ran into a similar situation at a company where I worked a few years back.
Ultimately the only solution was to do a formal proposal to management that
they expand the QA department by one head, and that new position was tasked
-only- to do documentation QA. They agreed, and in fact the person in that
slot turned out to be me.
The advantages of this were:
* Rather than seeing the doc reviews as a nuisance secondary function that
could get in the way of the primary function of checking software, I saw the
doc QA as my primary job.
* All the other QA people didn't have to bother with checking docs, they'd
just send it to me.
* The writers didn't have to play "find the left handed smoke shifter"
trying to figure out who was reviewing the docs, it was always me.
* The writers didn't get back vague comments like "This is all wrong, fix
it," I gave them specific details on how to fix the docs.
Although right now this isn't a great time for suggesting an increase to the
head count, this is a solution you might want to keep tucked away for the
future when things get better. (And they will.)
--Rick Lippincott
Lockheed Martin
Saugus, MA
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