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> From: Pete Kloppenburg <pkloppen -at- CERTICOM -dot- COM>
> To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
> Subject: Re: Managing Expectations
> Date: Thursday, October 09, 1997 11:58 AM
>
> Eric tabled the topic of expectation management.
>
> I find that managing expectations counts among the biggest
> non-writing tasks I have these days.  I am the sole technical
> writer at a $400 million company, and I manage and write the
> documentation for 3, no, now 4 products.
>
> Probably I'm in a minority position of having programmers as my
> primary audience, and, as long as the docs are accurate and
> somewhat usable, their expectations are easily met. What tends
> to be the bigger challenge is setting expectations for my
> corporate masters.
>
> For a while that meant keeping schedules realistic and demands
> for animated talking paper clips to a minimum.  Now I find that
> certain currents in the company's culture are downplaying the
> importance of documentation.  So now I'm trying to raise the
> expectations for my documentation - I'm trying to convince people
> that our docs can do more than simply provide a reference for
> our software libraries.  I'm trying to show them that docs can have
> a powerful marketing function as well.
>
> It's a dangerous game.  I guess my contribution here is that
> managing expectations can be not just a matter of keeping them
> down, but also sometimes of keeping them up.  If you manage
> to get everybody to have very low expectations of documentation,
> even if you exceed those expectations wildly each time, the net
> effect can be to lower the percieved value of your docs across
> the company, and that can be just about the worst thing that can
> happen to your professionally in this business.
>
> Pete
>
> Pete Kloppenburg - pkloppen -at- certicom -dot- com
> Technical Writer
> Certicom Corp
> Mississauga, Ontario,
> Canada
> http://www.certicom.com
>
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