Department Structure

[Rebecca Carr <rebecca -at- WHITE -dot- SC -dot- TI -dot- COM>]

In our organization, graphic artists are just that and have nothing to do
with the structure of the manuals, layout or otherwise. They are
responsible for the graphics they create for the book. These are created
per the writer's direction and/or the engineer/developer. The graphic
artist is an important part of the team. He/she has expertise on how a
given graphic should be presented, line weights, shading, etc and certainly
adds alot of value to the project, but they are not involved in the development or the structure of the book (and wouldn't want to be). If the graphics artist
has questions regarding a diagram, they first ask the writer. The writer may
know the answer or may contact the engineer for the answer and get back to
the graphics person. The writer always attempts to find out the answers
and is the key person responsible for the manual and for communication
between everyone in the manual process. In our organization, the writer
knows the steps needed to accomplish the task and gets on with it.
The writer "owns" the book and is responsible for it being completed on
schedule.

Usually, the graphics information is given to the writer responsible for
the book and they give this information to the graphics artist doing
the work. The writer knows the physical size of the book and relates
the page size to the graphics person so they can create it in the correct
size frame. Sometimes the graphics person does the work inside the
document itself (providing they have access to the files) and sometimes
they create it in their own file and put it on the writer's desktop for
the writer to insert into the document wherever they think it should go.
Much of this depends on whether the book is a revision of an existing
manual or a completely new book.

The writer and the engineer/developer ideally manage the the life cycle
of a manual. The engineer/developer knows information they want
to impart and the date they need to publish it, but the writer (hopefully)
has expertise in documentation that the engineer/developer does not have
and can usually coordinate the development of the manual to meet the deadline
requirements of the engineer/developer.

Again, ideally, the writer shares his/her knowledge with the engineering
team and together they agree on the structure of the manual in question.
The experienced writer should have plenty of backup material to provide
when engineering wants to know "why it should be done this way".
Research such as industry standards on best book size, easiest fonts to
read, size of fonts, best layout for technical material, rulings for tables,
etc. And of course, the writer should have a good reference library to look
up grammatical questions, technical terms, trademarks, etc....hopefully
with some technical books related to the industry they are working in.

It is sometimes a struggle to convince management that the documentation
department knows what it is doing and that management should trust
the documentation team. We've worked hard to get to a place where our
team is respected for our expertise and trusted to get the job done.
This doesn't happen overnight, but can be accomplished with hard work and
initiative.

Becky