RE: Structuring Tech Pubs

["Hutchings, Christa" <cwhutchings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At my first company, I was part of Customer Service. At the next company, I
was part of Engineering, then part of Technical Support at the company after
that. Then I worked for a company where the various Tech Pubs groups
belonged to the Corporate Communications division, and now I'm part of the
product management team assigned to Marketing.

There were good and bad sides to all of them, but like Jim Stauffer, I think
that the best fit was as part of Tech Support. They were most concerned with
servicing the customer and understood the value of good, usable docs.
Engineering is so used to looking at the product from the backside that they
have trouble seeing it from the front (i.e., the user's point of view),
Corporate Communications seemed more concerned with adherence to standards
than in producing user-oriented manuals, and Marketing tends to think of
user docs as just another piece of marketing collateral (i.e., will it help
sell the product - not will it help the customer use the product after
they've bought it).

Being part of the product management team is working out okay for the most
part, but we still have to slug it out with the rest of the marketing geeks
occasionally about the true purpose of user docs.

**********************************
Chris Welch-Hutchings
Senior Technical Writer
Home Wireless Networks, Inc.
mailto:cwhutchings@homewireless.com
http://homewireless.com



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