Re: Release notes, customer support and product managers
I wrote Release notes for a product which has a number of components
and therefore a few Product Managers. They approve the information
about the new products, a list of relevant bugs and limitations, and
approve what is finally written.
IMHO, what is missing from the good advice you've already gotten is that you need to follow the money and unravel the tangle of loyalties and motives you've got today. You've tended to align with the PMs as your customer, but you might easily fall into this trap simply because you depend on them for your documentation input. My experience is that the customer for documentation is usually downstream (in the direction of the user) from the development effort. You might well be working for CS, and they might well be honking mad that you're not giving them the consideration they're expecting in exchange for their documentation dollars.
The problem that makes customer identification so important is that PMs and CS can have radically different self-serving ideas about documentation. I'm not clear on what your CS department is responsible for (are they marketing, help desk, or what?), but as a general rule, CS and PMs have different goals: the PMs want the work completed and out the door on schedule--in effect they want to hand off responsibility for day-to-day support of the product to Customer Support. CS might want significantly more documentation than the PMs are willing to provide. If you feel like a shuttlecock, it might be because they're both pointing the fickle finger at you as the one responsible for their documentation.
Does this make sense in the context of your organization?
If so, consider this: the CS team might be paying you to go get the documentation from the PMs, but the documentation the PMs approve is likely to be weak in areas the development team feels are dev's exclusive domain. The PMs won't cooperate with you when CS sends you back to get documentation. The PMs aren't willing to make the product developers unhappy by requiring them to write up things that the developers feel are too case-dependent or too complex to hand off to CS. In spite of this territoriality, CS will naturally continue to be driven to get the information needed, to have it readily available when needed, if not distributed in the documentation.
So, regardless of how "right" the PMs and CS people are in this expectation for final control over the documentation, their differences can result in some awesome adversarial situations when the PMs feel their being asked to squeeze the developers harder, or when CS feels they're being talked down to by the developers, or stonewalled by the PMs, or (dare I say it?) not given the chance to exercise their documentation acceptance criteria.
The good news for you is that when you're clear about who your customer is, then the problems with power and politics become just plain old tech writing, which of course, is never as easy as it sounds.
Good luck!
Ned Bedinger
doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com
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Release notes, customer support and product managers: From: Carrie Baker
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