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Subject:Re: Corporate writing group structure From:John Kohl <sasjqk -at- UNX -dot- SAS -dot- COM> Date:Thu, 2 Oct 1997 12:46:27 GMT
In article <19971001231711 -dot- 25876 -dot- qmail -at- hotmail -dot- com>, Larry Weber
<larry_weber -at- HOTMAIL -dot- COM> writes:
|> Former or current corporate techwhirlers,
|>
|> Presently, the writers in our company are assigned to a particular
|> product. These writers report to the product manager. One of the
|> management honchos wants to hire a Writing Manager and have all writers
|> report to that person. This would allow them to distribute writers to
|> different products more efficiently. It's said that the writers will be
|> "experts" in a particular product, but will help out as needed on
|> others.
|>
|> I'm not exactly thrilled about this. I like to dig my teeth into a
|> product and contribute to the design--something I fear will be difficult
|> if I'm being reassigned to different products often.
|>
|> Anyone have any experience--good or bad--in such a transition?
Well, just from my own experience, I know that when I am familiar with
the product that I am documenting, I can work probably 50% faster than
if I'm writing about a product for the first time. There are far fewer
questions that I have to ask of developers, and I can produce a better
quality doc because I can detect more of the inconsistencies and errors
that reviewers often overlook or don't care about.
However, if your company, like mine, has a lot of different products
and writers to juggle around, then the one-product, one-writer approach
might leave some writers relatively idle for long periods of time. In
that case, the "distributed" approach might be a necessary evil. And it
is probably good to have more than one person familiar with a given
product, so that if your "expert" leaves, your quality and efficiency
don't suffer so much right away.
John Kohl
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