Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Don't ask me, ask the customer
Like a number of technical writing teams we have users and we have customers. They are not the same people, they don't have the same goals, and they don't have the same level of access.
Our customers are the project teams. The managers responsible for getting the product out the door. They have customers and users, and again they aren't the same people. Ultimately, our customers, the people who pay for our services and place the value on our services are the shareholders. They don't come down to the cubicle I sit in and tell me that I can or cannot do something, they have a much more effective tool set.
The shareholders tell the executives that they want to make more money. The executives figure out whether they can do that by producing more market share, reducing development costs, or by firing a bucketload of employees (and dumping their workload on the remaining employees). It seems to come down to a mix of options. Get more product releases out, sell more of them, and reduce the cost of producing them.
Lovely. Well, all things considered, producing content that accurately reflects the product and provides meaningful assistance to the folks who end up using the products is a snakey line dance. With more product releases we have to march through our process more often, making small and large changes, and regurgitating content on an assembly line model. Can do. Wait, though, our users are different (not really within a single product line but across product lines) and we want to increase sharing so that we can pick up the pace on production.
We have been tracking down the people who meet users, for real, and asking them what the users need. The results are diametrically opposed to the trend to reduce content and promote reuse. Dang.
Our customers are the project teams. The managers responsible for getting the product out the door. They have customers and users, and again they aren't the same people. Ultimately, our customers, the people who pay for our services and place the value on our services are the shareholders. They don't come down to the cubicle I sit in and tell me that I can or cannot do something, they have a much more effective tool set.
The shareholders tell the executives that they want to make more money. The executives figure out whether they can do that by producing more market share, reducing development costs, or by firing a bucketload of employees (and dumping their workload on the remaining employees). It seems to come down to a mix of options. Get more product releases out, sell more of them, and reduce the cost of producing them.
Lovely. Well, all things considered, producing content that accurately reflects the product and provides meaningful assistance to the folks who end up using the products is a snakey line dance. With more product releases we have to march through our process more often, making small and large changes, and regurgitating content on an assembly line model. Can do. Wait, though, our users are different (not really within a single product line but across product lines) and we want to increase sharing so that we can pick up the pace on production.
We have been tracking down the people who meet users, for real, and asking them what the users need. The results are diametrically opposed to the trend to reduce content and promote reuse. Dang.
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