Documentation Consultancy
Documentation no longer means simply ensuring that your product is shipped with printed manuals. Today's range of online and web based publishing solutions should be exploited to ensure that increasingly I.T. literate users get the information they want, quickly, and in the most appropriate format. I can help your organisation create better user assistance by:
- Analysising your existing documentation provision
- Identifying the scope of your documentation (what tasks do your customers need assistance in achieving?)
- Identifying the types of documentation required (step-by-step instructions? reference material? frequently asked questions?)
- Selecting the appropriate publishing format (online help? printed materials? video tutorials?)
- Selecting the right authoring tools, and using them effectively
- Advising on information design to ensure documentation is well structured, referenced and indexed
- Developing style guides and editorial standards to promote consistency in multi-author environments
- Developing single-source solutions that produce print and online materials from the same source
- Creating templates to reduce duplication and ease document creation
Improving the documentation process
The best documents are a team effort. All too frequently, documentation is developed in isolation. I can help your organisation to harness the combined skills of your development, marketing, support and validation departments by:
- Liaising with developers, project managers, training consultants and support staff to deteremine documentation requirments
- Improving the documentation review process within your organisation
- Raising the profile of authors to ensure their contrubtion to the development process is recognised
- Controlling distubution to ensure documents are accessible, version controlled, up-to-date, and authorised