Shoap Technical ServicesThere is an unfortunate trend towards using more images and icons and using fewer written instructions (I like to say “words”). Personally, I don’t think it’s obvious what every icon actually is and what it means, especially when I’m in a hurry to do something.
Whenever I can squeeze an hour out of the month, I like to attend the TAG (Technology Association of Georgia) presentations of what they call technology “Rock Stars.” This past week, Val Rahmani from Damballa spoke about her experience moving from almost 30 years at a large corporation to running an internet security start-up.
As technical writers, we notice a lot of things that other people do not. I tend to notice too much because I’m a little too detail-oriented for my own good. But this can help improve whatever product, service, etc. I am documenting.
At Shoap Technical Services, we take pride in our ability to offer our clients fixed-priced bids for technical documentation and training. We feel that this is an advantage to our clients because everyone likes to know how much a project is going to cost before they start. And we feel confidant that we can correctly estimate a project because 1) we’ve done so many technical writing and training projects over the past 25 years and 2) we’ve learned how to break down a project into small enough parts so we can assign numbers (time) to each part to determine a total cost. What we like to say is, “If we can put our arms around the project, we can successfully bid it.” While we have, at times, missed our estimates and had to finish a project at a loss, most of the time we’re pretty accurate. That makes our clients happy because they know from the outset what they’re going to have to pay and it allows us to make enough money to stay in business.
A client recently asked us to take over the maintenance of a batch file specification she had been updating. She reached out to us because it was taking so much of her time to keep the document up to date.
As part of our proposal to do the work, we suggested that it would be better to convert the existing Word file into an HTML-based solution, such that there would be an HTML page for each XML element that was in the file. In that way, we argued, the developers using the material would have instant access to all of the information they needed when they needed it.
As a student of writing for well over 40 years, I’ve learned one thing: you can’t write about what you don’t understand. This is true whether the topic is Shakespeare’s contemporaries (my doctoral thesis topic), what you did during your summer vacation (a topic I never assigned when I taught Comp 101), or the attributes of an SQL database (which my company has recently done). Or perhaps a more accurate statement might be, you can write about something you don’t understand but no one will understand what you’re saying.
The first real question I get when talking to a prospect about technical writing or creating training materials – after the “personal” pleasantries – is “what’s it going to cost?” Of course, the question is usually qualified by “I know you can’t give me an exact price” or “I’m sure you’ll need a bit more information before you can quote the project” but bottom line, everyone wants to know how much they’re going to have to pay.
No surprise there.
… we have come to value … working software over comprehensive documentation…
We don’t do a lot of work with practitioners of agile methodologies. I think that’s partly because there’s some built-in hostility towards documentation in the values of agile development. Of course, while the Agile Manifesto is referring mostly to documentation for the front end of the cycle (i.e., the giant FRS), that hostility ends up spilling over to end-user documentation as well. (I don’t think that was the intention.)