FW: Documentation planning (was Re: FW: Extreme Technical Writing )

[SIANNON -at- VISUS -dot- JNJ -dot- com]

[Syed Ahmed writes a wonderfully detailed analysis which I'm snipping only 
for brevity.]

Excellent posting, thank you!  Just because I have a thing for restating 
something to see if I understand it correctly, would you say this is an 
accurate summary of the methods you described(?):

Given only a software application to work with, to start,
1 -- Use the "knowledge-gathering" phase to create a preliminary document 
describing the functional design of the application.
2 -- Using the insights gained from the knowledge-gathering phase, propose 
a standardized document set derived from industry standards for the 
platform and development tools being used.
3 -- Use the proposed document set as the basis for discussion with both 
development and business stakeholders to determine the expected 
deliverables, and define scope and depth as applicable.

I'll have to agree with you that "tabula rasa" situations like that can 
offer a nice creative stretch after dealing with a more confined and/or 
tedious project.  I *wish* I could have gotten the business and development 
folks together early on in my initial project here, I think that would have 
helped.  I know that going out of my way to talk with business stakeholders 
in later stages has helped tremendously. (Since I inherited some docs in 
varying stages of usability, applicability and accuracy, much of my needs 
analysis had to be done on the fly, while engaging in technoarchaeological 
reconstruction.)


Debating whether a kamikaze visit 
to the customer on one new project 
might not be a good idea right about now,
Shauna

 

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