Project Management

How To Assemble the People You Need
for Your Documentation Project

By Steven Greffenius

When you need to produce a technical document, you can rely on three types of resources. You can employ in-house staff, hire temporary staff through a contracting agency, or hire the services of a technical publishing firm. Let's compare cost, quality, and control of these three options.

Cost

From the standpoint of price, using in-house staff is an attractive option. They are already on the payroll, and they already have much of the training that they will need. Outsourcing the job requires adding a substantial chunk of money to your budget request. The budget item is visible and has to be justified, whereas assigning the job to people already on board is invisible to the manager who oversees the budget. If the people who take on the publication were hired for that kind of project or were idle anyway, then the company has made good use of its resources.

On the other side, a major writing project won't boost the morale of engineers or other staff who do not see documentation as part of what they were hired to do. If writing forces them to neglect other important work where they feel their talents are well used, then the hidden cost to the company can be rather high. In that case, outsourcing the project can make the final stages of product development more efficient and less aggravating.

Quality

When your company decides to produce a document, it is usually pretty late in the product development cycle. Customers want documentation with the shipped product, and they won't be happy if the instructions are missing. How can you produce a high-quality technical document—one that serves your customers well—on a tight deadline? This section examines the question of resources with the tradeoff between time and quality in mind.

Some managers look to agencies to help them assemble the resources that they need on short notice. Agencies can quickly send them candidates with the right skills. Later, they look at the quality of the talent they hired and wonder if they didn't pay too much.

The problem is not that agency writers cannot produce high-quality material. Many talented writers have worked with agencies. The quality problem arises because the agencies themselves use a "meat-market" model to place their offerings. They, too, are concerned with time. As a result, they generally do not know whether they have sent ground beef to McDonald's and their best filet to the Ritz, or the other way around. How does this problem look from the perspective of the project manager? Even if an agency looks attractive in the short term, the decision to hire staff there can cost time and money over the course of a project. The agency solves the immediate hiring problem, but this source of talent returns unreliable quality for a relatively high price. Why? For at least three reasons:

Contracting agencies must place many candidates every month to make a profit. They cannot take time to learn much about their customers' requirements or technologies. That is why they depend so heavily on clients' job descriptions and candidates' resumes to make a match.
Resumes are a poor way for anyone to match job requirements to candidate skills. Because agencies treat job skills as a commodity (such as experience with RoboHelp or FrameMaker), they do not know whether the person that they have supplied will actually serve their customer well.
Project managers urgently want someone who fills their need now. Agencies respond with the best person that they can find at the moment. They know that their customers do not have the time or the inclination to break off the relationship and look elsewhere for their talent. At worst, the agency can supply one ill-suited candidate after another until they get it right.

Of course, contracting agencies are here to stay. They serve some useful purposes for both writers and managers, and they have become well established in our trade. Most of all, they serve as a good backup when time is short. Yet both writers and project managers can easily let procrastination become a bad habit. If writers procrastinate in their marketing efforts and managers procrastinate in their hiring, then agencies become a routine fallback option. With foresight and plenty of direct contact, contract writers and project managers can develop solid business relations that result in high-quality work and less wasted time.

Control

Project managers may feel most comfortable if the work that they supervise is conducted in-house. That makes for smooth and generally uninterrupted communication. Guidance, feedback, trouble reports, plans, work schedules, and inter-departmental notices can all flow back and forth seamlessly when writers and editors work on the premises. In addition, on-site work gives writers and editors direct access to the company's network, and helps avoid the version control problems that can arise when work is conducted off-site.

In light of all these advantages, one might want to know why a project manager would ever want to supervise work conducted off-site. Here are several reasons:

Off-site workers supply and maintain their own hardware, software, and office space. The hiring company does not need to expend its resources to support the publication effort.
Off-site workers can be more productive, because they do not have to deal with long commutes and heavy traffic.
Perhaps most important, responsibility for project management sits more squarely with the off-site worker. As off-site workers supervise themselves, they relieve project managers of the burden of daily oversight. Instead managers review results at key points in the project.

Many projects, of course, include a combination of on-site and off-site work. Often, a great deal of on-site time is required during the research phase at the beginning of a project, and during the publication phase at the end. The document development phase in the middle can be conducted on- or off-site. Writers and project managers can agree in advance on what arrangement will work best.

Summary

Here are some guidelines that we can derive from our analysis:

When money is plentiful, time is short, and the publishing task is relatively simple, a contractor from an agency can be a safe and efficient choice.
If your company has a staff of well-trained writers, editors, illustrators, and desktop publishers, use them. Many specialists in technical communications can develop skills in all four areas. Then, the only time to go outside for help is when the volume of work clearly exceeds the time that is available to accomplish it.
You should hire a technical publishing firm to complete your project if the following conditions hold:
- You want to pay a fixed fee for your project rather than an hourly rate for an unpredictable amount of time.
- You lack specialists for complex and labor-intensive publishing tasks, and you want to keep your engineers focused on their design work.
- You trust your vendor to deliver what you want, at the stated price, on time. If you have that kind of relationship with a publishing firm, then you can purchase good quality, and be confident that you have spent your resources well.