Re: Need feedback

Subject: Re: Need feedback
From: Michelle Petersen <mpetersen74 -at- cox -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 11:58:18 -0500


I ran into a similar situation at my last company with a few overzealous product managers. I had tried sending out "reviewer checklists" with my docs at first, but the product managers basically ignored these and commented on everything, whether it was in their review scope or not. To deal with the problem, I ended up doing a variation on what John and Eric suggested: treated their "suggestions" like a "bug" and implemented a very simple "doc bug" tracking database in Access.

As part of my bug tracking process, I asked my reviewers to assign a "priority" to each
change:

P1 = Inaccurate content
P2 = Missing content
P3 = grammatical error/typo
P4 = "style" problem or other cosmetic issue

Having them assign the priority themselves forces them to think "How important is this change, really?" Almost immediately, the product managers re-focused their reviews on P1 and
P2 issues.

In your case, you might want to add something between P2 and P3 for content re-org. If you're getting a lot of requests for restructuring the docs, you might want to talk to management about planning some time into your schedule for a large scale doc re-org. If you don't have the resources to do this, then you need to diplomatically communicate that to QA. If you can show management that you've consistently gotten a lot of re-org oriented requests, they'll be more likely to make that a priority, especially if any of these requests come from customers.

My other suggestion is to document your style decisions in a style guide, if you haven't already done so. Whenever someone questions my use of "email vs. e-mail," I can back up my decisions with a style guide.

HTH,
Michelle



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