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I have a similar situation with four levels of users. We are able to make
four role-specific manuals, but you could just as easily bring them into one
doc with separate chapters. In ours we included a simple Cross-Functional
Flowchart (done up in Visio in about 20 minutes) that showed what all levels
were doing at each step. Then we had a bulleted outline for each role that
users could see at a glance what they had to do at each step.
If you want to remove a lot of redundancy, you could also describe what all
users will do, then how role specific users would do things differently.
ie:
Log in:
All users must have their user name and password.
List out steps.
Role Specific Instructions:
Level 1 users: This step is not applicable to level 1 users. Level 1 users
must select the Guest button.
Level 5 users: Must also enter their supervisory number.
This way could be confusing if it's as chaotic as you say. I'd lean more
towards separate chapters according to the roles being used.
hannah
to -dot- hannah -at- usa -dot- net
jackie wrote:
> Have you tried breaking it out by function (or task) and user
> level be damned!
> Each user will know his or her task. I wrote one document
> entirely by task and
> was happy with the results, as was the project manager.
>
---------------------
kelly wrote:
> I'd like
> to inform as
> > to how the whole process fits together, but it seems more
> important to break
> > it out by role (or level of user). Maybe do both? If so, how?
> Have a chapter
> > called something like "Workflow Overview", then other chapters titled by
> > user level?
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