By Mike Corrigan and Steven Greffenius
"Once burned, twice careful," they say, or something close to that. Often folks feel that they have ended up with something they didn't expect or want after they hire someone to develop a technical document. We have discovered a strategy that helps avoid this sense of grim disappointment. Writers can create a well-defined set of expectations, and develop sound plans to realize a project's goals. These early-stage activities contribute materially to successful completion of a project later on.
Our work assignments are most successful when we follow a well-established development procedure. At the outset, we divide the work into several phases that require different kinds of collaboration. This method increases interaction between us and the other key individuals that are involved in the project. Most importantly, it gives those individuals plenty of opportunity to guide our efforts. The completion of each phase becomes a milestone in the project, where both the project manager and the writer can measure progress toward the initial set of goals.
The plan must encompass all three of the major phases in a documentation project: research, writing, and publication. A couple of factors, though, make development of a good plan something of a challenge. First, the boundaries between the major phases aren't terribly well defined. Moreover, each phase has unique activities and sub-phases. The project plan has to develop along with the project itself in order to take these uncertainties and complications into account. That requires participation from everyone on the project team.
Editor's Note: Part II of this article explains how plans help move a project from one phase or activity to the next. It will appear in the March/April issue of the Boston Broadside.
Mike Corrigan is an embedded systems engineer, and president of MHC Enterprises in Wilmington, MA. He can be reached at MikeCorrigan@compuMHC.com.
Steven Greffenius is CEO of Techniscribe, Inc., a technical publishing company in Dedham, MA. He can be reached at sgreffenius@techniscribe.com.