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> Is there any time left for doing your job? While all of these things are
> nice to have written down, this is secondary, one-off work. This type of
> stuff should be developed in down-times.
How do you know it wasn't?
Much of the procedural information that the original poster mentioned was
REQUIRED of me when we were preparing for our TL9000 audit. You can argue
the merits of TL9000, or ISO certification, but the fact remains that we HAD
to pass the audit because we had promised our customers that we would. Not
passing the audit would have meant losing sales--sales we sorely need.
> And yes, you should be able to write documentation without a formal style
> guide and documentation plan. The best style guides emerge naturally out
> of writers doing the documentation and making decisions about the material
> as it is being written.
I personally have been writing documentation without a formal style guide
for years. I simply wrote down my procedures/processes for the TL9000 audit.
That was sufficient.
I agree that you don't HAVE to have a formal style guide to do a good
job--but it can't hurt to have everything documented, and in my case, I HAD
to document what I was doing for TL9000.
Nora
Senior Technical Writer, Charles Industries
nmerhar -at- charlesindustries -dot- com
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