RE: Boeing Tech Pubs going offshore? (long)

[Mike Stockman <mstockman -at- mac -dot- com>]

On 06/16/2003 9:31 AM, Richard Lippincott (richard -dot- lippincott -at- ae -dot- ge -dot- com) 
wrote:

>But we can't assume that it's going to catch the
>critical mistakes, even if we -want- to assume it will. In a way, this is
>just a variation of the old "tech writer's don't need to understand the
>content" argument. In this case "Don't worry if the Chilean writers don't
>know anything about aircraft maintenance procedures. Boeing QA will fix the
>mistakes." The problem in the process may be (as I've experienced in other
>places) when the reviewers just glance over the draft, and don't stop to
>think if what is written actually works. 

An excellent post, Richard... I'll just agree with everything you wrote, 
and will clarify only the part of my message that you responded to above.

I wasn't saying that their documentation quality will be good because of 
their quality control. I was saying that they won't *ship* bad manuals, 
because of good quality control. The new writing group, wherever they 
are, will either write garbage or quality documents... then Boeing's 
quality control prcess will either accept the documents or refuse to use 
them. I assume this is true of Boeing because I've never heard anything 
bad about their manuals, and planes aren't dropping out of the sky 
because of lousy documentation.

And, for the record, I'm a big, big believer in writers needing to be 
subject matter experts (SMEs) for everything they write. No exceptions... 
you can't write good, complete documentation without knowing the subject 
very, very well. If Boeing's writers had been mindlessly quoting SMEs and 
acting only as publishers of someone else's expertise, we'd have a lot 
more crashes because the docs would suck.

I posted originally to stop the scare tactic of planes crashing (dear 
Lord, think of the children!) because Boeing is outsourcing its docs. 
Outsourcing does not necessarily lead to poor quality docs... that 
happens only if the company allows bad docs to ship. There's nothing 
about outsourcing that *must* hurt quality, so planes won't automatically 
drop out of the sky because of outsourcing unless Boeing lets other 
processes fail.

Hope that clarifies things,

Mike




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