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Re: Training and documentation teams play well together?
Subject:Re: Training and documentation teams play well together? From:Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:16:12 -0700
I've had two experiences working documentation side-by-side with training.
The first was a small startup where my three-person team worked with a
single trainer/manager, and of course that worked well because we were both
building processes from the ground up and just coordinated them,
In the second, I took over management of a larger team that already had a
shaky relationship with the training group. Both were writing their own
docs with very little coordination, so the training manager and I (we were
both new) worked together and had to do a little beating up of our
respective teams to get them to talk and work more closely together. We
were well on the way to merging a number of operations and developing an
idea for converting docs to single-sourcing so we could chunk them down to
bits that would enable common material to be referenced by user and
training docs, but the company's business plan self-destructed in the post
9-11 slump and that was the end of that.
In my current company, the trainer has been using the manuals whole, since
users work directloy from them in the field, and we've been working on
making adjustments to the existing doc template to make things make more
sense. He has very quickly become my most dependable reviewing resource.
Just remember that one of your mutual goals in working together is to make
each others' lives a little bit easier and less stressful.
Gene Kim-Eng
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