Re: Walk-throughs

[Scott Miller <smiller -at- CORP -dot- PORTAL -dot- COM>]

A few things to watch out for during documentation walk-throughs:

- Reiterate repeatedly that you don't need to hear about minor errors
such as punctuation, spelling, grammar. If they mark it up on the draft,
fine, but it doesn't have to be brought up in the meeting.

- Often, the only time engineering, marketing, and tech support are in
the same room together is for a documentation walk through. Therefore,
huge communication gaps are commonly revealed, such as which features
are in the product, who the user is, the product name, and so forth. It
is easy for a walk-through to get sidetracked. When this sort of thing
occurs, tell the participants to either take up the discussion offline,
or save it for the end of the meeting. The catch is that these issues
often affect the documentation, so it's tempting to try to resolve them
then and there. If you do, you sometimes spend the entire meeting
discussing one or two issues, and the documentation doesn't get
reviewed.

- There is always someone who can't get with the program, who raises
issues such as "is this document necessary," and other subjects that
have already been resolved. Ignore them.

- Scott Miller
smiller -at- portal -dot- com

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> > I was wondering if anyone out there had ever conducted a manual
> > walkthrough, either in the preliminary or final stages. I'm looking
> > for a different approach to our walkthroughs. I work for a company
> > where nobody wants to sit down and dedicate a few hours to the
> > quality of our manuals.
> >