Faster than a speeding bullet

Two products that work together, customer information delivered on a CD as printable manuals and HTML help branded for the company and unbranded for its OEM partners, a four-month software development cycle, one technical writer.

One technical writer who does not pull late-nighters or work from home on weekends. One technical writer who meets deadlines and wins awards for the material.

How does that work?

Pretty well. Thanks for asking.
It’s all about strategy and tactics. The strategy is pretty simple: Do only the things that move you forward, but do whatever it takes to keep moving. The tactics are familiar, in principle at least, to most technical writers:

• Audience analysis – who are your customers? What do they need to know? How do they find out now, and how would they like to find out?
• Design from meta to micro – what are your largest units of documentation, and how do you decide what belongs in each one? What are your smallest units? How do you assemble the small units into the big units? How do you integrate new pieces of information? How do you make sure you'll never be caught flat-footed by a new requirement, such as translation?
• Project management – how do you keep track of all the project requirements? How do you ensure that you are aware of all the new features under development? How do you determine what parts of the documentation are affected by each change or new feature? How do you ensure all the material is updated?
• Time management – how do you make sure the important things get done and the project stays on schedule?
• Technical review management – how do you persuade your technical experts to give up some of their precious time to check your work? How do you ensure they’ll be willing to do it again?
• Quality checks – how do you make sure that you publish material that won’t embarrass the organization?

Tune in next week for some answers.