I have been thinking a lot about documentation recently, now that I am about to go back into full-time consulting work again. My professional background has quite literally been completely built upon documentation – originally as a spec writer in a large development environment, then as a product manager still in that same large development environment, and later as a business analyst in a much smaller, more agile (and also more global) setting.
Boy, were those two completely different worlds of documentation! In the one setting, we had team fully dedicated to managing documentation – ENTIRELY! We were documentation specialists. In the other setting, documentation was either needed or not needed. It wasn’t someone’s “job” to document, rather, the documentation was a byproduct of the development or business contract.
Of course, I didn’t mind the second setting in the least. Even though I have a technical writing degree, I completely get the logic behind the theory that documentation is simply a means of communication, and a pretty lousy one at that.
Here’s why:
— Tia Peterson
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