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-----Original Message-----
From: David Neeley
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2005 8:50 AM
Subject: Re: Updated documentation?
> Allow me to make strong endorcement for Geoff's observation that the
> engineer's response was appropriate and should be encouraged.
Yeah, what he said.
I also work for a start-up, and things can get "interesting" at times.
But in my formerly lives working for big and medium sized companies, the
same thing has still happened where an engineer gives something directly
to the customer before going through documentation. It's not just a
start-up thing. But when it comes down to it, procedures may not have
been followed to the letter, but the end result is good - something the
customer needed was identified and generated. If you can be a good
sport about it, hopefully in the future engineers will come to you while
they are working on solving the problem, and everyone can work together
to get the documents updated quickly to meet customer needs. If it
continues to happen faster than you can get the documents fully updated,
I'm also a big fan of using bulletins or official notices to customers
that are distributed by the doc crew, since it at least gives you a
better handle on the information that is changing.
As far as how to get the new information in the docs and out to the
customer, I'm also a fan of updating everything and re-sending it. With
the way our documentation currently works, I've been bringing in handy
dandy little things like version summaries and version numbers to help
identify what information has changed and that the documents have been
updated (I know, nothing super innovative, but it's stuff that wasn't
there three months ago, we're evolving.....)
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