Re: taking too long

[Andrew Plato <gilliankitty -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

"William Turner" wrote...
> 
> Genevieve, as Andrew Dugas recommended, you need a documentation plan.  The
> plan should detail the scope of work, ideally with book outlines, and
> contain a schedule that includes interim review dates (the reviewers of
> your documentation should include time in their plans to review your
> documentation during the time that you specify). 

If you're already behind, stopping to do a comprehensive doc plan isn't going to
get the job done faster. 

Clearly some kind of project status needs to be communicated to management. This
does not necessitate generating a time-consuming doc plan. 

 >Just as you should have
> the chance to sign off on the engineering plans, the rest of the
> cross-functional team should review and sign off on your documentation
> plan.  This is not simply CYA; cross-functional signoffs ensure that
> everyone is pulling on the oars in the same direction at the same rate.

It is CYA and CYA is no way to run a business, career, life, etc. 

Why would a writer sign off on engineering plans? That's absurd. Unless you plan
on CONTRIBUTING to the engineering, then there is no reason for you to sign off
on it. 

> Not to hijack this thread, but the reason that I responded here is that
> writers who are ignorant of this planning process make life difficult for
> all writers, because, as Genevieve's boss apparently demonstrates, there is
> a tendency among those in other disciplines to underestimate the difficulty
> of producing good documentation.  

And there is a tendency among writers to obsess for eons over minutia and divert
themselves into one-off work. 

On-time is almost always more important than perfection. 

> There seems to be a general ignorance of how writers get the information
> that they put in the documentation.  Part of the problem is that engineers
> typically think that their designs are so elegant that their products need
> no documentation.  They think that if documentation is required to satisfy
> Marketing, the writer should be able to figure out what to write by using
> the finished product.  

While specs are nice, there often are no specs for engineers either. So that
issue is moot. 
 
> I recently interviewed for a TW job where this was exactly how the
> development process worked.  The writer was expected to wait until the
> software that she was documenting was complete - no engineering specs - and
> then figure out how the software worked by playing with it.  She was
> expected to write a rough draft based on her guesses, submit the
> documentation for review, and then make the recommended changes over the
> weekend before the ship date.

Life in the big city.

Andrew Plato 

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