How to
Assemble the People You Need
for Your
Doc Project
When you need to produce a technical document, you can rely on
three types of resources. You can employ in-house staff, hire
temporary staff through a contracting agency, or hire the
services of a technical publishing firm. Let's compare these
three options as to cost, quality, and control.
Cost
From the standpoint of price, in-house staff are an attractive
option. They are already on the payroll, and they already have
much of the training they'll need. Outsourcing the job requires
adding a substantial chunk of money to your budget request. The
budget item is visible and has to be justified, whereas
assigning the job to people already on board is invisible to the
manager who oversees the budget. If the people who take on the
publication were hired for that kind of project, or were idle
anyway, the company has made good use of its resources.
On the other side, a major writing project won't boost the
morale of engineers or other staff who don't see documentation
as part of what they were hired to do. If writing forces them to
neglect other important work where they feel their talents are
well used, the hidden cost to the company can be rather high.
Outsourcing the project in that case can make the final stages
of product development more efficient and less aggravating.
Quality
When your company decides to produce a document, it's usually
pretty late in the product development cycle. The customer wants
something written when the product ships, and they won't be
happy if the instructions are missing. How can you produce a
high quality technical document – one that serves your customers
well – on a tight deadline? This section looks at the question
of resources with the tradeoff between time and quality in mind.
Some managers look to agencies to help them assemble the
resources they need on short notice. Agencies can send them
candidates with the right skills, quickly. Later on they look at
the quality of the talent they hired and wonder if they didn't
pay too much.
The problem isn't that agency writers can't produce high quality
material. Many writers have worked with agencies, and they have
found plenty of talent among their colleagues there. The quality
problem arises because the agencies themselves use a meat-market
model to place their offerings. They, too, are concerned with
time. As a result, they generally don't know whether they've
sent ground beef to McDonald's and their best filet to the Ritz,
or the other way around.
How does this question look from the perspective of the project
manager? Even if an agency looks attractive in the short term,
the decision to hire staff there can cost time and money over
the course of a project. The agency solves the immediate hiring
problem, but this source of talent returns unreliable quality
for a relatively high price. Why? At least three reasons exist:
• Contracting agencies must place many candidates every month to
make a profit. They cannot take time to learn much about their
customers' requirements or technologies. That's why they depend
so heavily on clients' job descriptions and candidates' resumes
to make a match.
• Resumes are a poor way for anyone to match job requirements to
job skills. Because agencies treat job skills as a commodity –
Does the candidate know RoboHelp? FrameMaker? – they don't know
whether the person they've supplied will actually serve their
customer well.
• Project managers urgently want someone who fills their need
now. Agencies respond with the best person they can find at the
moment. They know their customers do not have the time or the
inclination to break off the relationship and look elsewhere for
their talent. At worst, the agency can supply one ill-suited
candidate after another until they get it right.
Of course contracting agencies are here to stay. They serve some
useful purposes for both writers and managers, and they've
become well-established in our trade. Most of all, they serve as
a good backup when time is short. Yet both writers and project
managers can easily let procrastination become a bad habit. If
writers procrastinate in their marketing efforts and managers
procrastinate in their hiring, agencies become a routine
fallback option. With foresight and plenty of direct contact,
writers and project managers can develop solid business
relations that result in high quality work and less wasted time.
Control
Project managers may feel most comfortable if the work they
supervise is conducted in-house. That makes for smooth and
generally uninterrupted communication. Guidance, feedback,
trouble reports, plans, work schedules, and inter-departmental
notices can all flow back and forth seamlessly when writers and
editors work on the premises. In addition, on-site work gives
writers and editors direct access to the company's network, and
helps avoid the version control problems that can arise when
work is conducted off-site.
In light of all these advantages, one might want to know why a
project manager would ever want to supervise work conducted
off-site. Here are several reasons:
• Off-site workers supply and maintain their own hardware,
software, and office space. The hiring company does not need to
expend its own resources to support the publication effort.
• Off-site workers can be more productive from day to day
because they don't have to deal with long commutes and heavy
traffic.
• Perhaps most important, responsibility for project management
sits more squarely with the off-site worker. As off-site workers
supervise themselves, they relieve project managers of the
burden of daily oversight. Instead managers review results at
key points in the project.
Many projects, of course, include a combination of on-site and
off-site work. Often a great deal of on-site time is required
during the research phase at the beginning of a project, and
during the publication phase at the end. The document
development phase in the middle can be conducted on- or
off-site. Writers and project managers can discuss what
arrangements work best in advance.
Summary
Here are some conclusions we can draw from our analysis:
• When money is plentiful, time is short, and the publishing
task is relatively simple, a contractor from an agency can be a
safe and efficient choice.
• If your company has a staff of well trained writers, editors,
illustrators, and desktop publishers, use them. Many specialists
in technical communications can develop skills in all four
areas. Then the only reason to go outside for help is when the
volume of work clearly exceeds the time available to accomplish
it.
You should hire a technical publishing firm to complete your
project if the following conditions hold:
• You want to pay a fixed fee for your project rather than an
hourly rate on an indeterminate amount of time.
• You lack specialists for complex and labor intensive
publishing tasks, and you want to keep your engineers focused on
their design work.
• You trust your vendors to deliver what you want, at the stated
price, on time. If you have that kind of relationship with a
publishing firm, you can purchase good quality, and be confident
you have spent your resources well.
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Steven Greffenius