RE: Request of Advice

Subject: RE: Request of Advice
From: "McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>
To: Bill Swallow <techcommdood -at- gmail -dot- com>, John Posada <jposada99 -at- gmail -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:48:13 -0400

John and Bill were saying:


>
> Amen, John. Amen.
>
> On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 5:04 PM, John Posada
> <jposada99 -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> >> Wouldn't it be something if you could buy software that required
> >>little to no training, and caused little to no loss of productivity?
> >
> > You can.
> >
> > Hire experienced technical writers that don't require a learning
> > curve. What you are paying for with new software is not the
> CERTAINTY
> > of needing training...what you are paying for is that your EXISTING
> > writers cannot pick it up as soon as they pick it up.
> THAT'S the cost
> > of getting writers on the cheap.
> >
> > Bring in writers at a little higher money, with experience, and even
> > if the writer never saw the particular application, you will get
> > production in a very short time, maybw within hours.
>


HOWEVER... a writer who's never seen the particular tool
before will necessarily bring to it the approaches and
experience s/he's had with other tools.

So, there they are, 7 hours after arriving at your
company, dutifully cranking out their first page or
two of Help, as they did it with Doc2Help.
But they're using (say) Flare now, with no previous
experience and a [n apparently] frantic deadline to
provide some evidence of motion. (Gotta justify having
displaced [former?] in-house writer[s].) So they start.

Weeks later, it becomes apparent that there are some
problems due to having used pliers as though they
were a wrench. Considerable backtracking and fixing
is necessary on dozens of pages. Stuff that the writer
didn't understand about the Flare design philosophy
has been bolluxed and must be rectified before the
single-source stuff will work properly.

Finding this out, and then finding out how to fix it,
and then fixing it... turns out to take about as long
as giving the displaced in-house writers a three-day
training or access to (and time for) the Flare Webinars.

Plus, of course, the disgruntled or dismissed in-house
writer takes away her/his headful of years of experience
and history with your products.

- Kevin (playing devil's advocate)



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Follow-Ups:

References:
Request of Advice: From: s_borgioli
Re: Request of Advice: From: John Posada
RE: Request of Advice: From: Dan Goldstein
Re: Request of Advice: From: John Posada
Re: Request of Advice: From: Bill Swallow

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