Re: Someone to do the "donkey work"? (take II)

["Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>]

This is my arguement for up-front document plans that have buy-in from 
management (both yours and the developers').

If you have a big project to do that requires a lot of different kinds 
of work, laying out everything that needs to be done and the available 
resources to do it may reveal that the project requires (a) more time, 
(b) more resources, or (c) to become a smaller project.  Writers often 
plead for more time and/or more resources, but more often than not 
writers just accept that the development or marketing manager's initial 
concept of the project scope is some sort of chiseled-in-stone absolute 
that cannot be changed without bring on the Apocalypse (because only 
technical writers have resource and budget constraints, of course). 
Usually, when I've gone to talk to these people and told them there's no 
way to give them everything on their list on time and within budget, the 
reply is something along the lines of "so how close can we get, and what 
can we live without until a future rev?"

Gene Kim-Eng


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Downing, David" <david -dot- downing -at- fiserv -dot- com>
> Well yes, one of the reasons it bothers me is that it can take a 
> l-o-n-g
> time if there are a lot of manual references, and it seems like I 
> should
> be doing something else -- especially when I'm supposed to be 
> completing
> a big project ASAP, which is the case now.

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