I'm in a medium-sized financial company in the IS department. They have never had a tech writer before me, so there is little formal documentation and no document organization. Right now, their approach to creating/modifying products is focused on *PROJECTS*, which may touch one or more different software products. The project management organization keeps track of the documentation related to creating/modifying the stated project. However, if you want to find all the documentation for a given *PRODUCT*, you must search or hope you find someone with a long memory. I have only been here a comparatively short time, and only now feel as though I have a chance at redoing this system (maybe). Currently, the documentation that can exist for any given product may include:Project Charter, Technical Specification, Business Requirements, Use Cases, Functional Specifications, Process Flows, Test Plans, and oh, yes, technical references and user documentation. There are obviously some missing pieces here, but that is another problem.
My thinking is to come up with some sort of Master (Meta?) document that links all of these disparate documents together for any one given product, regardless of the PROJECT it was originally a part of. To give an example, we might have a PROJECT that concerns improving the speed of our batch processing, but it may touch several different PRODUCTS. I guess I'm thinking of creating a sort of logical map to the docs for a product, including a bread-crumb trail back to the associated projects.
Has anyone dealt with a situation similar? I am swimming up stream, here, but I know there has to be a better way! The chaos is chilling me!
Karen in Dallas
By ktd at 2007-08-22 13:05 | login or register to post comments
Need help with Documentation Organization
I'm in a medium-sized financial company in the IS department. They have never had a tech writer before me, so there is little formal documentation and no document organization. Right now, their approach to creating/modifying products is focused on *PROJECTS*, which may touch one or more different software products. The project management organization keeps track of the documentation related to creating/modifying the stated project. However, if you want to find all the documentation for a given *PRODUCT*, you must search or hope you find someone with a long memory. I have only been here a comparatively short time, and only now feel as though I have a chance at redoing this system (maybe). Currently, the documentation that can exist for any given product may include:Project Charter, Technical Specification, Business Requirements, Use Cases, Functional Specifications, Process Flows, Test Plans, and oh, yes, technical references and user documentation. There are obviously some missing pieces here, but that is another problem.
My thinking is to come up with some sort of Master (Meta?) document that links all of these disparate documents together for any one given product, regardless of the PROJECT it was originally a part of. To give an example, we might have a PROJECT that concerns improving the speed of our batch processing, but it may touch several different PRODUCTS. I guess I'm thinking of creating a sort of logical map to the docs for a product, including a bread-crumb trail back to the associated projects.
Has anyone dealt with a situation similar? I am swimming up stream, here, but I know there has to be a better way! The chaos is chilling me!
Karen in Dallas