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Those of you who have some sort of formal/semi-formal way of
reporting your progress on documentation projects, what do
you do?
Naturally, I answer for myself at progress meetings about
the entire development project (of which I'm a tiny cog),
but that's the ten-second blurb version and then somebody
else gets the hot seat.
I've been just telling people (project/product managers,
reviewers, others) verbally or in e-mail when they inquired,
but we've been asked to formalize something for future projects.
If you DON'T do any kind of organized, regular reporting of
"how it's all coming along", then by all means hang back,
unless you've got a convincing argument as to why your
decision-making cow-orkers should be routinely kept in
the dark. :-)
For the rest of you, I'm a lone-writer employee, not a
contractor, if that would make a difference. I do create a
"book plan" that is not much more than the proposed Tables
of Contents with some comments and a couple of milestones
relating to the product development/release schedule that
my docs accompany. I'm just re-issuing that, with revised
comments and summaries of noteworthy changes. Nobody is too
clear on what they want, other than "no surprises", so I
have a free hand to try different reporting methods. I vote
for minimal labor...
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