Re: Hi-Tech Company Hasn't Used Tech Writers in Years - Help!

[Chris Gooch <chris -dot- gooch -at- lightworkdesign -dot- com>]

Anne wrote about a situation where she is the only full time
tech writer and engineers do the writing. She sees inefficiency
in tool use and bad writing, and suspects she is seen as
an end of the line formatter by managers who don't see the
issues.


Anne -

It's perfectly understandable that management at this company could
take the view that the current situation seems to work well enough
so why change it. You say the work you do do is well received but
you struggle to get any to do. Your boss went on a "framemaker
rampage" and removed tools which he saw as getting in the way.

You say you've been away from the list so you may not have seen
the recent threads which can basically be summed up as
"product experts writing docs good, toolmonkey fontfondlers writing
docs bad". Management at your company clearly believe this
proposition (rightly so, IMHO). Therefore if you present yourself
as an obstacle to the engineers producing documentation you
will constantly be fighting battles you probably can't win. You know
that FM could save money by being more efficient than Word
(or whatever, that's just an example) but your boss just hears
"blah blah blah toolmonkey blah blah costs money blah blah".

Instead, could you try to position yourself as someone who
can make the current situation work better? How can you
help the engineers produce better documentation quicker
and more efficiently? Can you offer to set up some training on
how to write for the engineers, produce a style guide, help to
produce some standardisation in tools and demonstrate the
advantage in terms of $$$, or failing that train them in how to
use the tools they do use more efficiently? If management
balk at the idea of 300 FM licences (understandably) then
perhaps you could investigate free documentation tools
(openoffice, latex, xml).   Perhaps you can
show what benefits can be obtained by doing version
management of docs using the same tools used for
version management of the codeline? 

Assuming you can achieve all this, and demonstrate the
benefits, then maybe they will listen to you about the
benefit of embedding a full time writer in each project team,
as you should be able to demonstrate that these people will
be helpful product oriented team members, and not
font fondling tool monkeys (avoid such people if you are
involved in hiring or you'll be back at square one with your boss).

You should then have achieved the ideal situation of
writers (who may be full time writers, or engineers, depending
on the project) concentrating on writing about the project
which they are working on, without giving any unnecessary
thought to documentation toolsets, and a seperate
"docs build consultant" type role to support their efforts.


Of course, it won't be easy to achieve this - but that's what
I'd _try_ to do, anyway. YMMV. Good luck!

HTH
Chris.

Christopher Gooch, Technical Author
LightWork Design, Sheffield, UK.
www.lightworkdesign.com






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