Re: Help on Coordination between Engineers and Technical Witers

[Iliana Kostova <i_kostadinova -at- prosyst -dot- bg>]

Thanks to those of you, who have bothered to answer my question.

Sorry for not being more specific on what I meant by "technical". My 
point is that we do understand everything discussed on project iteration 
meetings (TWs here should have advanced technical skills to be able to 
write even a single line of user documentation), but they seem to 
concern more the future implementation than the future documentation. 
And sometimes the meetings last about 4-5 hours.

But I think (and as I can see most of you do too) that despite this, TWs 
should attend iteration meetings by all means. I've decided to ask the 
project leaders for separate meetings, related to the project 
documentation, if necessary. Honestly speaking, I don't have to go to 
more than 2 or 3 meetings a week.

I want to ask just another quick question - How do inform engineers that 
you have finished a piece of documentation. Is there a formal way for 
this. Here, a technical writer is supposed to post messages into the 
project's discussion forum.

Another idea is posting change requests, that describe in brief the 
new/changed features, to the responsible technical writer. After the 
writer completes the request, he or she sets the request's status to 
FIXED. Our internal system then sends automatically a notification to 
the requester, who is supposed to check the documentation correctness 
and confirm or reject the fix. I, as well as the other managers, think 
that this will make developers more involved with what's in the user 
documentation.