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> Without that information, it is very difficult to produce anything
> other than "click submit, OK, and close."
Unless you are a consultant that comes in out of nowhere and is told
to write new documentation in a vac, it's not a stretch to believe
that most companies know who their target audience is.
Within 2 weeks of being here, I knew that I worked for a division of
a multinational organization and our "thing" was to produce network
monitoring software. We determine the root cause of outage
situations. 75% of our customers are ISPs, telecom companies, and
enterprise organizations with very large networks and the majority of
the people to whom we write are NOC personnel.
Do I need to know much more than that if I have a solid Functional
Spec?
BTW...I've gone through the exercises of personas and use cases and
I'm a big fan of Cooper. Where that knowledge comes in use is to
create the BRs, FSs, and TSs. However, once I get whatever specs I'm
going to get, my job is to write documentation that allows someone to
perform an action with the application. It's pretty much that simple.
I'm not going to try and throw out all kinds of excuses why I
couldn't produce documentation on time and on schedule. I write and
with 20+ years doing it, I'm past coming up reasons why I can't.
John Posada
Senior Technical Writer
"They say everyone needs goals. Mine is to live forever.
So far, so good."
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