Help on Coordination between Engineers and Technical Witers

[Iliana Kostova <i_kostadinova -at- prosyst -dot- bg>]

Hi there!

It's Iliana Kostova, a manager of a publications department. I've been 
doing this for about 4 years.

At my company we're trying to improve the coordination process between 
developers and technical writers. The problem is that sometimes 
technical writers don't get notified of software changes or new features 
that should be present in the user documentation. And vise versa, it may 
happen that developers don't know if something is changed in the 
documentation and they don't check it for correctness. We're seeking for 
a way to define a formal process to solve this issue and place it in our 
quality management system (it's based on ISO 9001).

My company offers products, made of several projects. The input for our 
activity is software requirement specifications (I think they should be 
similar to product requirement specifications). But sometimes, they are 
completely out-of-date and turn out to be almost useless. A kind of 
solution is to check for changes all projects once a week, but this 
becomes a nightmare when there are more than 30 projects within a product.

How do you proceed in such situations? Do you have special meetings with 
the development team, discussing what the documentation should contain. 
Do you think that technical writers should attend the meetings 
discussing the design of a project? Here, these meetings are too 
"technical".

Btw. I've looked at the "Is this a typical technical writing 
environment?" topic and I've found some useful information there.  I've 
also searched the archive, but haven't succeeded yet to find something 
that I can use.

Thank you in advance for you help.