Re: Subject: Re: Bloated Docs: Identifying What's Useful

Subject: Re: Subject: Re: Bloated Docs: Identifying What's Useful
From: Alison Wyld <ajwyld -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 11:11:11 +0100

Just another thought for Doughty's project.

Don't try to do it all at once - make yourself some sort of incremental
improvement project plan and write it down. This will help preserve your
sanity (cause otherwise you'll go nuts trying to do everything all at
once.) Also it will be a good tool to help you explain to your management
what you are doing and how you are progressing. Finally, we all know that
no job is forever. You might get offered your dream job elsewhere before
you're done. Doing this will let your successor pick up where you left off.
It doesn't need to be complicated or involve much overhead. XL or something.

For example, I'm involved in a project with a big doc set that has evolved
over the last 10 years and has had a high turnover of staff. We now have a
strategy of rolling improvements, so every release, in addition to
necessary incremental updates, we pick one part of the set to overhaul and
rework. Last year it was the Operational Procedures, this year it was the
Compliance Statements. Working on the Compliance Statements made us realize
that the Developer Procedures could use some work - so we have written down
that this should be done next time. By that time, it will probably be time
to go back and look at the Operational stuff again... I'm sure you get the
picture.

cheers

Alison Wyld

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