Member-only story
Quality of Technical Writing
Who really does the work?
For many managers, the preparation of technical documents is regarded as an expense — and expenses need to be reduced. It is quite natural to want a technical document with minimal expense. I have a little story about this.
I was the third member of a team working for a new software package for petroleum engineers. An engineer developed and checked the math; a programmer put the software together; I was the user tester (bug finder) and manual writer.
The company had several other software packages for the petroleum industry. My boss allowed me to attend a two-day seminar on one of these programs, presented by the engineer in charge of this software.
As I went through this seminar, I realized that the user manual was not backing up this software. If users wanted to find out how to do Task XYZ, they either needed to figure it out on their own or call the company for help. The company supported their software with two engineers taking these calls.
The two engineers supporting this software worked a few offices away from my office. I could see they were spending about half their day on the phone explaining how to use the software to customers. The other half of their day was working on engineering contracts with that software.
