How to appease a consultant? ::long::

Subject: How to appease a consultant? ::long::
From: "Lady Lurker" <lurker_lady -at- hotmail -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2001 22:15:01 +0200

I've been a lurker for quite some time. Never thought I'd have to write but....

I am a technical writer with 4 years tech writing experience and 10 years programming experience. I'm an American who recently moved to Holland for this job writing hardware and software documentation. Before moving here last week, I was a medical tech writer in Australia for three years.

The programmers are great, as well as the project managers. The consultant technical writer, however, is another story.

The company hired a consultant who will be here until October, in his 50s, from the UK and says he's been a technical writer for 20 years. he interviewed me along with the engineering dept head.

He sent me an installation guide to review and even said he'd welcome my comments. He spends most of the day explaining to me that he's FrameMaker certified, although when I suggested that we may want to consider FrameMaker for the larger documents (thinking that would make him happy) instead of Word, he quickly pointed out reasons he had to keep using Word.

Well, I tried to be diplomatic but I really thought what he'd written was a piece of crap. It's an installation guide without detailed steps, he had all the steps listed in one very long sentence, followed by screen captures without headings. The screen shots are not referenced anywhere in the text. He also has cautions and warnings intermingled throughout the text. He describes in another sentence after the screen shots what will happen if you don't perform the action/task for EACH tasks. He never mentions the product by name anywhere in the guide either.

We purchased RoboHELP a few days ago, which he has used to literally dump the printed document into HTML-Help format. There is no difference between the printed documentation and the HTML-Help file.

The company is happy with any documentation because before he came, they had none. They'd settle for documentation on a roll of toilet paper (a quote from marketing).

Although he copied basically the entire company when he sent me the document, I went to him *personally* and said the document was a good beginning but maybe in the future, we might want to consider explaining procedures in an ordered format (as opposed to one long never-ending sentence - didn't say that), referencing the screen shots, using second-person throughout the document, consider that the help files should vary a little from the manual.... He seemed fine with that and went outside to have a smoke.

Well, fifteen minutes later, the engineering manager calls me into his office to say that "Paul" was upset and didn't appreciate me commenting on his work. The manager was laughing the entire time but suggested that I speak to him and just leave him alone.

I go to my desk and he runs outside to have a smoke the second he sees me. I waited but then had to go home.

I still have 3 weeks left on my probation period, he's here until October, how would you suggest I deal with him? I guess I figured if he'd been doing this for 20 years, things like a peer review wouldn't make him run and cry to the boss but now I'm afraid to say anything for the next few weeks.

The larger problem is the documentation IS crap and, although the company is happy because "it's better than nothing", after he leaves, I'm the one stuck with actually improving it all.

I don't want to run like the wind (tech jobs here for native speakers are a-plenty) because I've never spent less than two years on any job. Can someone give me any ideas on how to appease him?
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