Organizing advice needed

Subject: Organizing advice needed
From: Jane Bergen <jbergen1 -at- EARTHLINK -dot- NET>
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 22:53:01 -0500

Hi, folks,

I recently took on a mammoth project. I'm writing a user guide for a
3-year old in-house program for which NO documentation (except some
pretty minimal online help) has ever existed. No formal training has
existed either. The program is really massive....I've been making
screen shots and have somewhere around 150 so far. And I know that
more than a few are lurking in dark corners. We have tabs within tabs,
and buttons within those tabs that produce more dialogs. It's pretty
bizarre, actually.

The company is a huge international leasing concern -- it leases
equipment to its customers and occasionally sells a few things. The
program, which runs on Windows NT (with a few Win 95 clients), does
billing, lease-life tracking, inventory, and other related tasks. It
has a separate Admin piece for which I will probably make a separate
manual. It also works with various reporting packages.

Other than its quirky design, it does work fairly well. In my
interviews with SMEs, the one complaint from the people training new
hires is always that the new people can't figure out where to go next.
The menus are un-Windows-like (it was ported from an old UNIX system
to Visual Basic 3, with almost no changes in the interface design,
they tell me). For example, the menus are arranged by department, but
that's really obsolete now as most of the screens are used across
several departments and some of the menus actually open duplicate
windows! To make matters worse, they are now working furiously to
upgrade it from VB 3 to VB 5. When I asked why not VB 6, they said
they would do that later.

The gist is this: I'm stuck with the unintuitive interface, Microsoft
Word 97 (yeah, yeah, I know...), and the requirement to document every
single "screen" (the inhouse term for "window" and/or "dialog box" --
the terminology also stays). Okay.... so save your breath on that. I'm
totally frustrated with the requirements, too.

My thoughts have been to trace the life cycle of a piece of equipment
from purchase to its retirement, and organize the document accordingly
with a separate chapter for the finance-related tasks that are not
necessarily tied to a piece of equipment. It will have an index, of
course. Does that organization sound reasonable or is there a better
way? Most of the software I've documented has a single
purpose....usually easily traced from start to finish. This one,
however, twists and turns and doubles back...not to mention the
functions that people have forgotten about because there was no
documentation.

The users range from the GED graduate hired away from the WalMart
warehouse to marketers to accountants to the telephone receptionist
to the whiz kids in development. No commonality here....even in
employers, as about 70% of the workforce consists of contractors.

Thanks for any advice. And I truly apologize for the length.

Jane Bergen


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