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

[John Posada <jposada01 -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

> Don't take this the wrong way, because I'm not volunteering. 
> But it seems to me that you could use your diagram and an
> anecdote or two about features you never of heard of before
> (impersonation?) to throw together a short presentation on 
> why you should be given a budget to hire two or three
> additional writers. Hurry. End of year budget time is now (if
> they're on a calendar year). Get the presentation (or even an
> email) in front of the right people now and you could be
> sitting pretty next month.

This is one year premature and also three years overdue.

Up until about a month or two, the concept of an inclusive
documentation set was a only a dream in my manager's mind. They'd had
three, maybe four prior writers and the prior writers never got the
concept of document books for each process; a process being an
inclusive part of the portal, such as the complete Web Interface or
the Security Infrastructure. They also didn't last long because may
manager, not being a documentation guy, knew what he wanted but
couldn't verbalize it. It seems that the previous writers were
interested in creating short, small stand-alone documents, and he
knew it wasn't what he wanted (kinda like the "I don't know what I
want, but I'll know it when i see it").

So...I'll give it a few months. I'm just starting to get to a
critical mass where the developers are seeing that the more and
better the documentation, the less they are going to have to deal
with the client and can instead, just point to the documentation.   

Also, we're on a hiring freeze, so even if it was due, it wouldn't
happen right now.

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer

"Bigamy is having one wife 
 too many. Monogamy is the same."
     --Oscar Wilde
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