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Victoria Sharpe wondered: <<The product I am documenting already has
some online community/user generated documentation, due to the previous
poor customer service response and lack of detailed documentation.>>
A small political note: You may want to make such statements under an
alias in future. You never know when an employer will
Google you to find out what you've been saying about them, and there
have been several recent cases of dismissals and nasty lawsuits over
what employees had to say about their employers in their private time.
<<At first I thought it would make my job easier, but I'm finding much
of it to go against standard protocol for department inclusion in our
official products.>>
It's not clear what you mean specifically about "inclusion". Don't
forget that anything published online is copyrighted, and you cannot
use it without permission. But that's not to say you can't use this
material as a powerful source of inspiration. There's an anecdote I've
never been able to pin down about an architect who created a university
campus without any formal paths between buildings. When asked why, he
replied that his goal was to let people wear their own paths in the
grass, and by doing so, define where they (_not_ the architect) wanted
or needed the paths to be.
The lesson of this anecdote is quite clear: by examining the paths your
audience is creating online, you will gain key clues into the topics
they consider to be of the highest priority and the approaches they
find most effective in meeting their needs. If the organization or
content of this information is subject to review and revision by the
audience, as in the Wikipedia, you'll gain important insights into the
form and structure of their "ideal" documentation. You'll also find
much misinformation, disinformation, and myths or outright errors. Even
the errors are important, because they tell you how people perceive the
product--and thus what metaphors people use to understand the software,
and what misperceptions you must correct.
All of this tells you how to create your own documentation: It sets
your priorities, helps define your structure, and provides insights
into the type of content you must create. Then you can create that
yourself.
<<Speaking with other colleagues on a regular basis, I'd hear plenty of
complaints about company executives not appreciating documentation
efforts, so does this affect those efforts and if so, in what way?>>
This kind of resource is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it clearly
demonstrates to management that documentation is crucial, and that
people will go to great lengths to get it. On the other hand, it
clearly demonstrates that we're superfluous: fire us, and people will
create their own documentation.
There's no easy way to balance these two problems, though you can
certainly gather customer complaints and criticisms from the online
forums, and with the writer's permission, quote the material to
management to demonstrate a need for significant improvements in
documentation. But managers are human too (rumors notwithstanding), and
thus subject to Sturgeon's law: 90% of all managers make crappy
decisions, either routinely or occasionally. (Sturgeon was more harsh,
and was talking about writers.)
Allowing for the fact that Sturgeon was clearly being misanthropic, the
fundamental point remains valid: managers are not always perfect,
highly skilled, well-trained, always-logical beings, and often have
other priorities, such as surviving the next budget cycle. Our concerns
are not theirs, and may never even show up on their radar, no matter
how well-justified our opinions.
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