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If you have an experienced group. the easiest way to divide up the work is
to ask the members of your group which products they would like to work on.
(Even if they are not experienced, ask them which ones seem interesting to
them.) Then, let them look at the work involved, and ask them to tell you
if they need another writer to help some of the time, or all of the time.
Help them if you think they need it. Have department status meetings weekly
with your team. If someone has several products that get "hot" at one time,
reapportion the work load or assign someone to help temporarily. Ask for
volunteers first though :-)
I worked in a large writing department (15 writers) with hundreds of
products (in telecommunications) and we handled the work load this way.
There were few scheduling problems, because each person had several
maintenance products, and a couple of new ones, but at different stages of
development. If one person had too much to do all of a sudden, the other
writers helped them. It helped us all understand our product offerings
better.
It worked surprisingly well, and allowed writers to have some choice about
working on things that interested them. It's good to make suggestions
though. You can help writers to grow their skills by asking them to work on
a more technical product that requires 'stretching' a little.
Hope this helps.
PT
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:32 AM, <lamanning -at- mmm -dot- com> wrote:
> Hello! I'm looking for information about how to divide a growing workload
> among writers I am a new writer in a Health Information Systems doc group.
> We write for 120 products, maintain 600+ documents (several output
> formats). Any effective strategies/tools/medications out there??
>
> Laura Ann Manning
> Technical Writer
> lamanning -at- mmm -dot- com
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printed documentation. Features include support for Windows Vista & 2007
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