This week, we have experimented something in technical writing peer review.
As I am working in a software product company, and the estimated development time of the single product is more than 2 years, it requires huge documentation work. My team has already created lots of technical as well as user documentations in this regard. We have already assigned single or multiple products - based on the complexity - to each technical writer in order to get domain expertise.
Afte one and a half years, we felt that our user manuals need to be audited as early as possible because we could not update the functionality changes frequently due to the amount of work as well as lack of information flow. The major constrain what I faced as a team lead was nothing but ‘TIME’. If I ask my team members to review their user manuals again, I am sure that they can not complete the work within 20-22 working days.
As we are working on 8 products simultaneously, we are not in a position to review each product in pdf and then update the relevant comments in the FrameMaker document. I have formulated a simple idea that nothing but “Save a copy, Create a new document version, and turn on the track edit option of FrameMaker. Then review and write the user manual as it is your responsible product”. I am not sure if this method still exists in the technical communication world. Anyway, we have shared our documents and source materials such as system overview, technical notes, functional spec, emails, SME interview details etc. etc.. to another technical writer.
When I reviewed the review, I find that 2 of my team members were doing same error while peer reviewing; that was nothing but they were simply commenting like they did earlier. I have given clear instruction on how to perform the review and corrected the issue.
The result was incredible! As of now, the user documentation is accurate. I couldn’t even imagine that we will get this output.
Fellow writers... you can use this methodology.
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