How will your business benefit from a Technical Documentation Advisor?
Most modern product or service technical documentation is an afterthought. Documentation that is rushed and written impromptu is never as useful or attractive as it should be, and that can negatively affect a company's bottom line.
Expertly planned documentation can benefit your company in the following ways –
Customer-facing documentation
- Reduces the load on your customer support team
- Reduces warranty claims from product misuse
- Improve your corporate image
- Increases the perceived quality of your product or service
- Increases your trustworthiness to your target customers
Internal documentation
- Increases productivity from digestible, useful process instructions
- Reduces lost-time injuries and increases overall safety
- Reduces the time required to train new workers
- Simpifies the onboarding process
- Allows experienced workers to answer fewer questions and be more productive
- Reduces the risk of scrutiny from regulatory bodies due to sloppy work and poor training
Why shouldn't we just hire an experienced technical writer to do the planning and writing?
Quality experienced technical writers are expensive and difficult to find. And, if you employ a recruiting agency, the cost expands even further.
Most importantly, decades of experience aren't necessary to actually write documentation with an effective plan in place, but you're still stuck paying for experience indefinitely.
With a thoughtful, practical, realistic plan, you can save up to 40% per year by hiring less experienced, less expensive writers to produce the content.
How can you develop a documentation plan without intimate knowledge of our business?
I've been a technical documentation consultant since 2008 and am very accustomed to walking into a business cold and asking the right questions to become productive quickly.
In addition, I've purposely chosen to work with diverse clients in a variety of industries to gain an understanding of how good documentation looks and works across a wide range of scenarios and uses.
Of course, I will interview your stakeholders and learn about your product or service before recommending anything. But, my experience has shown that a solid documentation philosophy can apply across many industries, products, and services.
Click here to see some examples from the Quake Lake Industries portfolio of work.
How does your process work?
At a high level, I start by learning about your company's current and future needs and wants from technical documentation, interviewing stakeholders, and learning about your product or service. If you have any existing documentation, I will ask to see that too.
Based on what I've learned, I'll formulate a plan that suits your company, including the following –
- Appropriate documentation types and methods that suit your offering and your readership
- Documentation development software recommendations
- Document storage, management, and access recommendations
- A recommendation for periodic document updates based on criticality
- Recommendations to address any other potential documentation issues that your company is likely to encounter
- If you're expecting to hire a writer, I will also develop a candidate profile and participate in the process upon request
Assuming that your documentation stakeholders are reasonably available and that I'm given timely access to the resources required to develop recommendations, the entire process should take less than a month.
All work is done remotely through the virtual meeting software of your choice (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Google Chat, Slack, etc).