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Subject:RE: does quality matter? should it? From:"Melissa Nelson" <melmis36 -at- hotmail -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Mon, 14 May 2007 15:29:42 -0400
I am really lucky in my current position. My boss feels that the
documentation is as important as the product. The developers do not
necessarily agree with him, but he believes it and that is what matters. I
think it is important to feel valued. That does not mean I want every
document I produce to have a gold star and an A on it...but that value helps
me to produce much better documentation.
I worked at a place where no one valued the documentation and once that
started to rub off on me...I didn't value the documentation either and I
left. I guess the main thing to do in your situation is to find ways to keep
the documentation team valuing the documentation. If you value it and
produce documentation that makes you feel good, that will help fight off the
lousy attitude. If documentation is a frill, make it one heck of a frill!
Keep your chin up!
Melissa
>From: "Fiona Krycek" To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Subject: does quality
>matter? should it? Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 11:12:34 -0400
>
>hi there,
>
>I'm wondering if anyone has an opinion on the following:
>
>The doc group I work in is part of our Engineering department. About a year
>ago, Engineering got a new chief who declared that our documentation was
>too low-quality. At the time, the doc group consisted of a documentation
>manager, two senior writers, a midlevel writer (me), and a junior writer.
>
>Our Engineering chief's strategy for fixing the situation was to lay off
>one of the senior writers (the rationale was "we need an engineer more"),
>fire the other senior writer, force out the documentation manager, and
>pressure the junior writer into quitting. All this left only the midlevel
>writer (me). After about two months, one of the senior writers was
>replaced. After nine more months, a third writer -- an entry-level person
>-- was hired.
>
>So, now we are now a group of three, and we have been reorged so that we
>report to one of the software managers. At the same time, the demands on
>the writing group are even greater than they used to be because of new
>product offerings and because the company is now localizing everything. We
>writers are stretched very thin, so much so that we occasionally ask
>engineers to work on documentation (and to their credit, they have done
>it). I feel like even if I put in a lot of extra hours, my work is never
>going to be as good as I want it to be because the demands are simply too
>great. For a while, I dealt with this by working 60- to 80-hour weeks, then
>I reverted to more normal hours and just sort of resigned myself to the
>fact that I'm not going to be producing the best work of my life. My
>co-workers' feeling is that this is all OK, since documentation is only a
>"frill" for most software companies, and we shouldn't be emotionally
>invested in what we're doing anyway. Both my co-workers put in 40-hour
>weeks and don't seem too concerned about the fact that, overall, our doc
>quality is going down, not up.
>
>I have been trying to adopt this point of a view, but even if I agreed that
>documentation is only a frill, this seems to be contrary to what our
>Engineering chief goes around saying. After all, poor quality was the
>reason our last manager was pushed out of the company (ostensibly).
>
>So, my question is, do other people think that documentation is only a
>frill? If you were (or are) working at a company that doesn't take
>documentation very seriously, should this/does this bother you? If it
>doesn't bother you, would you be bothered by the contradictory messages
>coming out of senior management (contradictory because senior management
>says documentation is important, but does not support this through hiring
>or planning)? Can you suggest any strategies for managing this situation?
>
>thanks in advance, Fiona
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