TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Re: Loyalty Cuts (and a digression about quick-turn documentation and other ugly necessities)
Subject:Re: Loyalty Cuts (and a digression about quick-turn documentation and other ugly necessities) From:"Robert Plamondon" <robert -at- plamondon -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 11 Jun 2003 12:47:24 -0700
As a contractor, I find that loyalty to persons rather than companies is the
way to keep your strategy in the long term.
In the short term, you have to give your best until the end of the gig.
In either case, I find it helpful to not worry about whether the guys on top
really know what they're doing. You can heap up a lot of useless worry if
you second-guess the decision makers. It's much simpler to assume they know
what they're doing when they're on their own turf, and that my value-added
is to know what I'm doing on MY turf.
So if they want to sell complex, hard-to-use products to morons, I will
point out the difficulties from the documentation point of view, but I will
also assume that this ugly-looking decision is the best one available to
them at the moment, and do what I can to make it a success.
Because of this attitude, I am willing to do things that sting other
people's professional pride, such as shipping a slapped-together document to
meet a crushing deadline. Chopping quality and completeness to gain time is
sometimes necessary, and the product managers and the sales force have a
better grasp of the consequences than I do. I just stick my oar in from a
Tech Pubs point of view to make sure they aren't making the decision on the
basis of false data.
By the way, when people ask for a quick-turn document, I always point out
that the biggest problem is that you lose control over the quality -- unless
you reduce the size of the document to fit the schedule. Sometimes
slapped-together quick-turns come out great; sometimes they stink. It's a
roll of the dice.
The second biggest problem is that we don't have a good way of expressing
just where the minimum acceptable quality cutoff lies on the
pain-to-pleasure curve, so it's never clear whether any two people agree on
the amount of stinkiness that's acceptable. The Procrustean Bed method of
doing quick-turns (where you chop off whatever bits don't fit the schedule)
is a lot easier to communicate than the slap-it-together-regardless method
(where you dig up content out of whatever graveyards you can find and stitch
it together just as fast as you can.)
---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as:
archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.
