Re: Documentation estimates

[John Garison <john -at- garisons -dot- com>]

I am making a perhaps unwarranted assumption here that you are working 
for a startup company. Not many other places would have two products 
being developed in a a 7 month timeframe by a sole, newly hired writer.

In my experience in startups (10+ years) my "doc plan" consisted of 
finding out what was needed, when the due date was, and telling my boss 
(the VP) that he'd have what he needed when he needed it, that it would 
be full of accurate content, written clearly, and as concise as it could 
be. Then I started the work. I didn't take time to work out a detailed 
doc plan, or to come up with writing schedules or page counts. Instead, 
we met daily in team meetings every morning, I got ideas about what was 
needed and pitched them to the VP as well as the development and QA 
managers, and we got on with doing it. We all worked closely together so 
there were few surprises and we were all proud of what we delivered 
(except the QA manager who, in the last few days prior to release, had a 
gun held to his head when it came to deciding which bugs would be fixed 
and which were 'acceptable' to ship with). And I got nothing but 
attaboys from everyone - CEO on down.

My 2¢,

John Garison

PS - Granted, when the group got bigger and I had several writers to 
manage, we did a more formal job of planning.



Robert Landry wrote: