Carter Campbell

Technical Communications

(403) 708-9365

Calgary, Alberta

carter@soph-text.com

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SERVICES

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Types of service offered

The creation of solid, clear, and concisely written technical documentation for the high-tech sector.  These services are varied and wide-ranging, but can be grouped into the following three broad categories:

• general technical writing, such as user's guides, help systems, white papers, and functional requirements
• defining technical documentation requirements for future documentation projects
• defining technical publications departments for companies

General technical writing

This is the more traditional form of technical writing.  It is the creation and maintenance of formalized books, guides, pamphlets, and articles, and can include such subservices as:

• defining the documentation suite's development schedule
• defining the scope of a product's documentation suite
• creating the templates used by the documentation suite and description of the templates
• creating and maintaining the actual documentation suite
• creating a standards and maintenace guide for the documentation
• editing existing documentation

Possible document types provided:

Defining technical documentation requirements

You may find yourself in a situation where you know you will need to create technical documentation for a project sometime in the near future, but you are uncertain as to how to define the resources and requirements for that documentation.  In order to plan your project properly, you need to define the documentation's scope, its development schedule, when the writer should be brought in on the project, the tasks the technical writer must perform, and more.

The technical documentation requirements definitions service addresses this problem by evaluating your project's documentation needs, based on your project's requirements, and providing you with a documentation development road map that you can easily understand and implement.  This service could be invaluable in situations where you need to advertise for a technical writer and you need to get a handle on the materials, resources, and time, or you need to organize your technical writing effort in a single direction.

Defining technical publications department

Often, when documentation gets developed, it is thrown together, without any thought to its structure, content organization, presentation, or to the processes needed to create and maintain it.  It is usually put together at the end of the project, using whatever wordprocessor is immediately at hand, then promptly forgotten until the next time it needs to be dusted off and quickly updated.  This can mean that maintaining documentation is often as much work as creating a new document, if not more.

You will need to define your documentation suites, structures, schedules, development tools, and work flows, create definitions for describing a corporate or departmental technical publications group.  The definition activites are:

• Documentation Suite Scope

This activity identifies the size of the project and how much total work would be necessary to complete it, including:

• different types of documents to be produced, such as on-line help, user's manuals, etc.
• the audience for each document
• a functional specification of the final document suite

• Documentation Suite Development Schedule (with primary milestones defined)

This activity identifies the development schedule for the documentation, sets out the dates for the primary development milestones, and defines the stage of each document at each milestone.  It also roughly indicates at what stage of development each document is, in relation to the final document suite, on the project deadline date.

• Documentation Templates

This activity defines the templates that you will use to develop and maintain your documents.  These templates should include your corporate branding.

• Documentation Template Descriptions

The template descriptions define how to use and maintain the document templates.  They also describe the paragraph and character styles or tags that are contained in the documentation templates, and under what conditions each is used.

• Documentation Suite Standards Guide

This activity identifies necessary process standards and work flows that your developers should adhere to.  It also identifies the project owner, the manager responsible for the documentation effort, the names of the project's Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and which technology they are responsible for.

• Documentation Development Tool Definitions

This activity identifies the software and hardware tools that will be used to create the documentation.  It also identifies the location of the templates and template descriptions, and the project's working and publishing directories on your corporate LAN.

• Identification of Human Resource Requirements

This activity identifies the number of developers that the project requires and the level of expertise for each.

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