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Linda Castellani asks: "In your company, who decides what the
documentation requirements are?"
In our company the Sales and Marketing department has final say on those
matters, but they go with whatever the documentation group decides (and
these decisions are made in consultation with the field service group
acting as user advocates). We also assess what sort of documents our
competition has produced/is producing, and that factors into our
process. Bear in mind that both documentation and field service are, in
our company, PART of the Sales and Marketing department -- we all report
to the VP of Marketing, who has final say on all decisions from staffing
to documents -- so this decision-making process does not become
adversarial. (Also bear in mind that our company is young and small, so
our documentation "group" is, for the moment, me, and field service
consists of three people.) Sometimes we have to juggle the needs of
Marketing versus the needs of Engineering, and try our best to straddle
both worlds, but I think that this situation would be the same no matter
what department documentation and field service were in. In my opinion,
the scary thing is not that Marketing decides what the documentation
requirements are; I think the real nightmare is to have someone --
anyone -- making those decisions who is inflexible and unwilling to
listen to input from others who know their fields (and in my mind this
should include documentation specialists, field service/application
engineers, lead software and hardware engineers/designers, and product
managers). Will the Marketing folks in your company listen to reason in
making these decisions, or are they likely to be ill-informed? In my
opinion, this is the most important question for you to answer. If you
are not in the Marketing department (and I'm assuming that you're not),
try to make a strategic alliance there so that you or whoever is making
the recommendations to Marketing has a lot of room for argument,
dissent, and persuasion. I understand why you'd be wary of Marketing
making these decisions but, in my case at least, it actually works out
well. Good luck with this.
