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> -----Original Message-----
On Behalf Of Wade Courtney
> Sent: July 19, 2004 5:58 PM
> > And to respond to everyone else's recommendation to ask our
> >users. That sounds great, but how??? We don't have a way to
> >contact our end users. All we can do is ask other
> >people--such as you, our esteemed technical writing
> >peers--how they use a similar manual.
> Customer service people
> Product Managmement
> Field Service Engineers
> Sales
> You can ask anyone to be a proxy for you in gettting the information
> you want from you customers.
You can ask. . .
In our world, Product Management is... hmmm. Well, it used
to be two or three hard-working people who knew our specific
product lines like the backs of their hands, and who did jobs
like learning the market and working with Biz-Dev and other
groups to define the next version, writing up Product Specs
and organizing the comments and changes, working out the kits
and Bills of Materials, etc., and basically just watching
every last detail and following/leading their babies through
the process of getting to market. Now, those people are gone;
there's one senior guy to whom they used to report, but nobody
goes to him for anything. The tasks that they used to perform
have fallen onto the engineering team managers. The product
Road Map and other high-level product management stuff is done
in the US (we're in Canada). Anyway, ya just don't ask a distant
senior officer how to do the minutiae of your job. Career-limiting
move, there.
Customer Service... Well, that used to be four or five hard-working
people who knew our specific (oh, just read the first part of the
above para)... They are gone, laid off. Before they left, they
did some quick hand-off to the manager of centralized Customer
Support down in that same US office. He and his minions have been
dancing as fast as they can (and faster) trying to get up to speed
on our product lines, while still supporting the larger company's
existing product lines. Anyway, ya just don't ask these guys to
start doing customer surveys about an obscure part of the
documentation of one of the recently acquired product lines.
They're BUSY! dammit. :-)
Field Service Engineers? Well, they'd actually be the closest
thing to the right people to ask, due to how they intereact
with customers and potential customers. But, most of them are
travelling the world, working inhumanly long hours and struggling
to get things done across multiple timezones and a drastically
shifting logistical system. This would be way, way, way, way down
their list. Although, y'know, I still get some of my best comments
and pointers from those guys.
Sales... Well, with the layoffs and the pregnancy leave, we're down
to one at this office. She's dealing with department heads and
managers at Canadian government and large corporate offices -- to
her, *those* are our customers, the people who decide whether to
buy our stuff, not the grunts in the server rooms who will later
have to install and integrate it.
In your world, things work differently. What color is the sky there?
:-)
Kevin (being only a little facetious)
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