Re: Good Fast Cheap (was inherited ugly Word 7.0 documents)

[John Posada <posada -at- FAXSAV -dot- COM>]

I was brought on about a month ago to create the company's documentation program was scratch.  Therefore, with every document I create, I'm modifying the process to take in all the variables that I'm coming across.  Here's how my plan works at this point.

I'm receiving material from about 15 different people.  Most of the material is hardcopy, some is text in email, and a little is in odd formats such as troff, html, etc.

I've created a general template in Frame and as I get or find different "documents", I'm reentering them in this template.  As of yesterday, I've created a linbrary of over 25 documents, with a new document or two every day.

However, since many of these documents are up to 3 or 4 years old, they need a great deal of updating and trying to get a SME to re-examine a document is like pulling teeth.

Therefore, I did this.

I did the best I could to make the document as clean as I could.  Whenever I came across something that didn't make sense, I make a note right in the document, but i apply Bold, Underline and Italics to the comment, since i would never apply all three attributes in distribution and it really stands out. 

I logged the documents into a list and asked the Director of Operartions who would be the person to take responsibility for the particular process being described in the document.  (Understand that while some documents are 60-150 pages long, most are 5-10 pages.) 

I then converted the documents to PDF, created a page on the department's intranet, and placed the PDF documents with each document's title and owner.  It is now up to each developer's peers to see the condition of each other's documents, and no developer wants his/her peers to see a document describing a process that is wrong, incomplete or poorly written.  What happens is they download the PDF, print it out and make notes.  I get the corrections, make them, and replace the PDF with an updated version.  So far, about a third have been updated this way and I've only been doing this for a week.

John

-----Original Message-----
From:   Julie F. Sullivan [SMTP:jhesselgesser -at- OXMOL -dot- COM]
Sent:   Tuesday, November 25, 1997 1:18 PM
To:     TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
Subject:        Re: Good Fast Cheap (was inherited ugly Word 7.0  documents)

>Changing the style of legacy documentation can have a surprisingly high
internal
>overhead for your company -- <snip> Even if you do not change one word,
restructuring can hugely
>increase the reviewers' workload.

Wow! Someone actually takes the time to review documents in your company!!!!
This is a totally new concept for me. :)

Julie Sullivan




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