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Re: Job listings with demand for salary requirments
Subject:Re: Job listings with demand for salary requirments From:Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au> To:Techwr-l <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 6 Dec 2011 19:30:40 +0800 (WST)
> When I was contracting, if the client had an existing effort
> they wanted me to start with, I charged extra to review and
> test the existing content.
An important point. I was nearly bitten by this on a contract job. The client had three (very different looking) manuals that hadn't been kept quite up to date with recent updates to their hardware/software product. I only had seven weeks available so I was looking for ways to give them the best result by the end of the seven weeks. I suggested getting their training or testing people to check the existing material because, as Gene suggests, this can be both time consuming and inherently hard to estimate. The client's belief was that the each manual would be correct up to whenever it was last updated, but accepted that we needed to start from a firm baseline.
Well, a few days later the client called to say that hardly any of the procedures they'd checked so far was correct and complete. It was going to be a major exercise just to finish testing them all. They'd managed up till then because they had a couple of experienced technicians who could mostly set things up and talk customers through problems without having to refer to these manuals.
So I never did end up doing that job. By the time they were ready I was tied up on another job and I think they ended up getting a permanent TW (who probably would have been better off redoing the manuals from scratch).
Stuart
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