Re: The more you know, the less you know you know?

Subject: Re: The more you know, the less you know you know?
From: John Posada <jposada01 -at- yahoo -dot- com>
To: Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>, TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 11:42:20 -0800 (PST)

> triage: define what is essential and must be done if
> nothing else gets done, what should be done if I have
> time remaining, and what I can avoid doing at all (or
> delay to a future release without harming anyone
> much)? That focuses one's efforts most wonderfully.

In effect, that's what I'm doing. The following is an example from
last week.

The portal is in use by clients. In fact, we're on the 8.0 release.
They've just has 7 prior releases with little documentation. A
developer comes to me, telling me that X client wants to know how to
use the Forgotten Password functionality. It's something that has
always been in it, but never used. As a result of this client, I
produced a 27 page document that describes how to configure the
feature, then took it one step further and documented how the user
would use the feature. This becomes 2 of 14 chapters in the Portal
document.,,one chapter for the user guide and one for the
administrator's guide.

This week, a developer comes to me, telling me that we need to
document the feature in the application that allows clients to
incorporate Web Services into custom web pages. Another has me
working on some XSLT transformation stuff. All good stuff and all
interrelated.

Each of these features, and many more, are in a diagram I created
that shows the relationship of each feature to each other and to the
whole portal. As I cover each feature, I cross it off.

Here's an example of my problem. In documenting the feature last
week, the developer says. off-hand "This step gets it's the data for
this field through the Impersonation capability."

Impersonation??? 10 months and I'd never heard of this.

Like I said, this is fine and pretty much normal. It just happens
about once a day. I know there isn't as "solution", this is just the
way it goes. Like I said...the more I know, the less I know :-)

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer

"Well, you have to know these things
when you're king, you know." -
--King Arthur of Camelot.
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The more you know, the less you know you know?: From: Geoff Hart

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