Re: Do Document Reviews Provide Significant Feedback?

["Sharon Burton" <sharon -at- anthrobytes -dot- com>]

Ah! The reviewers look at drafts of the outline that the writer(s) creates,
based on the specs, use cases, and any available alphas of the product. The
process is iterative, until the outline is agreed upon. At that point, the
writing starts. The granularity of the outline is at a level that makes
everyone happy they know what's going in each section - think of an
annotated outline. For more senior writers, the level of detail is different
than for the junior writers.

At the company I'm working for, these reviewers are usually the product
managers, project managers, product architects, and product marketing. They
have a good sense of what our technology does and why that's interesting to
the users. (remember, I'm _building_ a writing group. We simply don't have
the product knowledge yet in our group)

Then in my group, we create a spec of that, assigning hours per topic,
estimated number of pages, estimated graphics needed, including conceptual
graphics and screen caps, and estimated hours to complete each topics,
including graphics. The time estimate tells us if we need to add more
writers or go back to the team and renegotiate the number of topics covered
or both or something else.

But we have real numbers from which to make these statements. And that
conversation goes much better with real numbers. I got contractors based on
these numbers, which was way outside the planned budget that was made before
I started.


sharon

Sharon Burton
CEO, Anthrobytes Consulting
951-369-8590
www.anthrobytes.com
Immediate Past President of IESTC

So then Tony goes, like:

What do the reviewers review in this up-front approval
process?  (Also, what is the granularity?)

(P.S. You can respond to the listserv if you like.)

Thanks,

Tony
> --- Sharon Burton <sharon -at- anthrobytes -dot- com> wrote:
>
> > A review as late in the game as the one under
> > discussion [after the doc has been written] should
> never result
> > in a reorg. The doc should have been planned and
> > approved before writing
> > started. Everyone should have been aware of what
> was
> > going in the manual and
> > in what order long before the writing started.
> This
> > should be the technical
> > review for accuracy....
> >


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