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It isn't just the engineers, the sales staff needs it too. We're developing
a V1 project. One of my writers told me that his biggest worry was that the
sales staff would sell the product before it was done without considering
the time needed to complete the documentation. Off I went to meet with the
sales lead. Engineering is aware of the docs dependencies, and after an
interesting conversation this morning, now the sales team is too. We're
cuddling up with the trainers so they know going in to it that the docs are
done AFTER the engineering is done, AFTER the code freeze and the UI freeze.
The trainers answer to the sales leads, so they can help us manage client
expectations. We need those sales folks to keep us in business, but we also
need them to know what we can deliver and when.
One of the hardest things for me to explain was that folks seem to expect
software to behave oddly, but they expect the docs to be accurate. Any docs
we create before the code and UI are frozen will be wrong by nature. They
want us to be able to hand off docs while the code is still slushy,
something I just don't want us to have to do.
Manage, manage, manage.
Useful advice in the previous mails, especially about the top down approach.
We're going to start doing that.... NOW!
Thanks.
Pam
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