Changing Gears

Finding a Common Voice, part 4

In the last post, I told you how the tech writers decided to focus on the long-term goal, rather than an interim goal, due to deadlines.

However, shortly after that decision was made, stakeholders told us that they wanted a short-term solution—NOW! This solution was for one set of products, and will continue until the long-term solution is implemented.

Once again, we switched gears.

We reformatted the Release Notes into a spreadsheet, using separate worksheets for each section of the document. The Known Issues are cumulative now, and show when the defect was first encountered. Users are able to search for defect numbers, or keywords. The format is similar to one used by another of our products. 

As a tech writer, the format is old fashioned. I would much rather see an interactive portal on our customer service web site. But this is acceptable as a short-term solution. 

Although pressure to focus on deadlines forced us to abandon a short-term solution, the stakeholders and clients complained loudly enough to force the issue. Harmonization was forced on us, to the delight of those of us that wanted to move forward with creating a similar look and feel of the Release Notes.

Tech Pubs was able to propose a format and move forward on changing the Release Notes because we had already talked about it as a team. We had analyzed the different formats of the Release Notes, and knew what we wanted to do. There were minor changes by the stakeholders, but the overall format had already been drafted. 

Last post, I was discouraged because our work was not going to be used. Now, I am glad we did the work. We were able to provide a quick turn around for the stakeholders, and we look like rock stars. Management is impressed with Tech Pubs and is more willing to listen to us.

That is worth all the stops and starts with harmonizing our documents.