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> hi, are there any pros/cons to having each
> tech writer in an organization
> report to an engineering manager, instead
> of having a tech pubs department?
Been there, done that, got fired. The advantage, they
told me, was that the engineering manager knows that he
has to take responsibility if the documentation project
fails. Otherwise-- if the tech pubs department is
separate-- the engineering manager can save time by
failing to cooperate with tech pubs and then say, at the
end of the project, "Hey I did my job, tech pubs didn't
do theirs."
One disadvantage is that the system reduces technical
writing to a checkbox on the engineering manager's list.
No one can manage technical writing well without a certain
commitment to quality and a certain understanding of the
field. Some engineering managers-- not all, but some--
think of technical writing as the stuff that no one reads,
written by the people not smart enough to be engineers.
Another disadvantage is that each engineering manager
has a veto not only on issues of quality but also on
issues of consistency within the company. One manager
can say "to hell with the table of figures, I've never
consulted a table of figures," another can say "What
do you mean _User's Guide_. We have lots of users,
that should be _Users' Guide_." And so on.
But worst at my old workplace was the personnel issue.
We'd had a technical-writing department where we could
rotate people from project to project in order to absorb
changes in workload, to broaden the writers' understanding,
to even out the distribution of plum jobs vs. jobs from
hell, and to keep the writers from burning out. The engineers,
of course, wanted to keep their pet writers prisoner.
They even insisted on having the writers sit with the
developers, rather than with the other writers who could
help them out on the little day-to-day questions of
correctness and consistency. And when the workload
got too heavy? The only way to get help from another
writer was to request that another writer be formally
released by another engineering manager.
When I rule the world, the technical writers will not
report to the engineering managers. Maybe vice versa.
"This manual is going out Tuesday, have the product
ready Monday." Yes, that makes more sense...
Mark L. Levinson
managing writer/editor
Gilian Technologies
The last line of defense against hacker sabotage
www.gilian.com
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