RE: Request of Advice

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

 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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