Re: Marketing view of documentation was Re: dispensing with documentation reviews

[David Neeley <dbneeley -at- oddpost -dot- com>]

Ned, 
  
It shouldn't be against any of your professional pride or discipline to do the same thing the developers do with a new prototype...label the docs as "preliminary" or "alpha" or whatever to indicate it is not the finished product. 
  
If you're still writing the finished doc, you should have a good handle on the design templates. Thus, whatever you have should *look* fairly good, right? 
  
You may want to use a "watermark" on the pages to indicate the document is "preliminary" and a suitable disclaimer up front...and, in fact, you may well include contact info for collecting errata. That, properly handled, may give the users of this "test release" a feeling of ownership--and you may also get useful feedback in the process. 
  
Where you do not yet have particular features detailed, I suggest you indicate that you know the material is missing, too. If yours is a somewhat typical development case, there is "feature creep" up to the last minute--then folks are screaming at the tech pubs department that *they* are delaying shipment of the finished product. Surely there are ways in which you can indicate that a feature is not yet stabilized enough for finished documentation? 
  
David 
  
-----Original Message from Ned Bedinger <doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com>-----
  
I committed a howler recently when I characterized the "marketing 
view of documentation", and thanks to a poignant inquiry sent to 
me off-line, I have purged any errant pejorative sense of 
"marketing" from my vocabulary, and now retract anything that I 
implied was attributable to the term "marketing" or the field of 
Marketing in general.  By way of explanation, I'd like to say 
that the project I was describing, where I worked under the 
"Marketing" department, was my sole project experience with a 
marketing organization, and under the circumstances and in 
retrospect, was probably far from normal.  I am grateful for the 
clarification in email about Marketing as a business function. 
So, please let me clarify what I was trying to say; the message 
has change little but the unintended insult to marketers has been 
removed: 

"Marketing" was the name of the internal group that wanted 
incomplete documentation releases with all of the bows and 
ribbons, like a finished product. Ann Pai may find this 
interesting because that Marketing department was an example of a 
group that had the power to drive the documentation requirements, 
and used it in a way that ran counter to my professional values. 
To them, the documentation, whether complete or not, would 
fulfill their commitment to providing documentation along with a 
test release of the software.  If I had not understood the 
special requirement for delivery of a good looking but incomplete 
doc set PDQ, it would have seemed that Marketing had arrogated a 
large portion of the tech writers' professional role, humiliating 
us and our best efforts by shipping out a "pig with lipstick." 

I didn't mean to extrapolate and attribute those situational 
ethics to the ethics of the entire professional field of 
Marketing. 

Sorry if anyone else was insulted by my apparent slight of 
marketers.  I hope my meaning is clearer now. 


Ned Bedinger 
Ed Wordsmith Technical Communications Co. 
doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com 
http://www.edwordsmith.com 
tel: 360-434-7197 
fax: 360-769-7059 



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ned Bedinger" <doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com> 
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> 
Sent: Saturday, May 29, 2004 1:40 PM 
Subject: Re: dispensing with documentation reviews 

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