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Convincing management of the value of documentation?
Subject:Convincing management of the value of documentation? From:Keith Purtell <keithpurtell -at- keithpurtell -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Sun, 18 Mar 2012 23:52:50 -0500
I've been working for several months at a digital publishing company.
Most of my job deals with PDF-to-image conversion for magazine
publishers. A month into the job, the production manager took me aside
and said he tries to give people opportunities to advance based on their
talents. He pointed out that we're working at an IT company where no one
has ever written documentation on any of our proprietary in-house
software or systems. (I formerly wrote documentation for Sprint.) As
things stand, every time someone new is hired, an existing employee has
to drop what he's doing and spend more than a week training the new
person. The production manager asked me to start work on some of our
core procedures and said this would give me a chance to be promoted.
However, our CEO has an odd attitude about staff's skills and their
value. He pays most of us less than other IT companies in the city. He
once stated that our job was so easy that "a ninth-grader could do it."
He's sending one co-worker to Germany just to learn about a proposed new
intranet system, but he doesn't want to pay people like me any more
money. Are there references I can use to illustrate for him why a
documentation manager is worth the investment?
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