How is editing organized in your company?

[Tom Storer <tstorer_tw -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Greetings and Happy New Year to all. I just discovered
this newsgroup and will take advantage of it to ask a
question.

(I first sent this message via the Google Groups site,
but was warned by a list member that only a small
fraction of the list would see it. So I gave myself a
Yahoo account to receive the list digest and am now
posting this for maximum distribution. Apologies if
you've seen it twice...)

The context: I work in a large-ish software firm in
France. The company is currently undergoing some
streamlining and reorganization, but at the end of the
day we'll have 15 to 20 writers plus 2 or 3 web
technology specialists, divided among 5 or 6 main
product or functional groups. The writers in each
group will report to a doc lead who in turn will
report to a dev manager, but there will be some
transversal doc duties to ensure consistency of style,
template usage, and so on. 

Until now we have never had any official editing. Peer
review is encouraged and doc managers review (with
varying degrees of diligence) the guides their teams
produce. We use an in-house Style and Usage Guide to
make this review easier.

The idea of "real" editing in the medium term is now
under consideration. By "real" editing I mean a more
centralized activity with clear processes and
definition of responsibilities. We'll soon be having a
brainstorming session to collect ideas and information
on how it's done in real life. We are thinking we
might have a full-time editor, or perhaps have two
people doing it half-time, working the rest of the
time on normal documentation duties.

The question: How *is* such an activity handled in
real life? If those of you who work in companies with
a well-defined editing activity could describe the way
it's organized, and perhaps give a few tips and warn
against pitfalls, I would be very grateful.

P.S. I'm not asking about how to edit, levels of
editing, that sort of thing - I already have a list of
books and articles on that subject. What I'm
interested in is how real-life companies organize a
serious editing function in their technical
publications department.

Thanks,

- Tom Storer

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