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Subject:Re: Creating a consistent look and feel for docs From:Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net> To:"Lathrop, Sarah" <Sarah-Lathrop -at- forum-financial -dot- com> Date:Thu, 07 Oct 1999 06:30:55 -0400
"Lathrop, Sarah" wrote:
Have any of you had any experience in getting people outside the
Documentation group to create documents according to a standard?
>
Sarah,
Yes, I have experience in that. Some of the people will follow the
template some of the time. The ones who are initially inclined to
cooperate are those who have had documentation jobs in previous lives or
who fancy themselves Office pros.
Because these are internal docs, however, you have time on your side. As
the same people who write the docs are also the eventual users of the
docs, they will begin to grumble that the docs they are using are
costing them time because they are incomplete, hard to use, hard to
read, etc. The pain will open them up to the notion that working with
you is more to their advantage than working against you. So by the
second or third generation of these documents, you should see pretty
good compliance.