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On Tue, 2001-10-16 at 16:09, Steven Brown wrote:
> Hi Megan,
>
> I think the most important thing to remember is that
> the needs of the organization should drive the
> documentation.
I agree wholeheartedly with you on assessing the needs of the
organization. One challenge we face right now is that the audience
hasn't / won't spell out (in any detail) what they need about these
docs.
I'm attached to a development group and the QA team is the largest
internal consumer of our documentation. This team has been asking for
"documentation" for over a year. When asked to define their
documentation requirements, the closest we get is, "We need you to
relate the system requirements to the code."
My challenge has been producing what the reader wants without them
explicitly telling me. Mind reading. :)
When developing documentation for internal users, I've often found that
these docs (more than any others) tend to go unread. So, to help get our
stuff read, I've decided to take a task-based approach to the internal
documents. We've taken our list of system requirements and I'll break it
down into sections such as, "How to perform task XYZ."
Meg
--
Megan Golding (mgolding -at- secureworks -dot- net)
SecureWorks, Inc.
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today.
It's already tomorrow in Australia.
-- Charles M. Schulz
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