High quality documentation solution on a project basis
As an R&D, Product or Program manager, you know that your product isn’t complete without the right documentation. However, you don’t always have the staff available, the documentation experience or the bandwidth to make it happen. You’re looking for a way to leverage a professional team for a mission that sounds almost impossible — a team that will get to know your technology quickly, explain it more clearly than your engineers can, fill the short-term gaps and be available on an ongoing basis, when needed — but you’re not sure if it’ll be more of a headache than it’s worth…
Project Assessment & Planning by an Experienced Hi-Tech Manager
JBS provides an efficient documentation solution for those scenarios when it’s not right to bring in a full-time technical writer. And before assigning a writer, one of our highly-experienced project managers works with you to assess and plan the work. Before starting the work we will ask hard questions in order to make sure that our work will achieve its goal and solve the actual challenge you are facing.
What content is needed and why?
Who is the audience?
What is the best timing for the documentation?
Does the knowledge already exist within your organization?
Who are the SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) that will work with us and how available are they?
What other resources are available?
Our project assessment enables instituting an approach to the documentation that ensures risk identification up-front, determines workflow by time constraints and ensures delivery of a high quality, professional product on-time. After understanding your needs and planning, we initiate the right project team for you.
Our staff brings the technical depth and expertise to get up to speed quickly, plus we’re available after the project ends for updates, during stress/peak times, or whenever you need us.
How do we get started (before we have an agreement in place)?
We start with a phone call. You explain to us what technical documentation you need and we chat.
The next step is for you to send us any existing, written input, such as specs or other technical documents, older versions of documents you need updated, presentations, drafts you wrote internally, etc. (if necessary, we sign an NDA at this point). At this point we might be able to give you a ballpark price and schedule for your project. If the parameters make sense, then we schedule a meeting.
At the meeting we gather more information. This can be by seeing a demo, meeting members of your staff, brainstorming together at your whiteboard, etc.
We send a written, proposal detailing the scope of work, the pricing and the terms.
How does JBS work during the project itself?
We start to learn your system. The way we gather information during the project itself can vary greatly depending on the scenario and can look like any of these:
Your team gives us an overview of the system we are documenting and discuss the various users and Use Cases. This could be any where from two hours to a few days, depending on the complexity of the system.
You give us access to a system and we “play with it” and become familiar with it.
You give us background material to read.
We write! Based on the detailed outline that was agreed during the pre-project phase we start writing content, drawing diagrams and taking notes as questions arise.
As we work we identify issues (like features not being available or changes required in the outline) and update you. We submit partial drafts for review (we try to pace the work so we can keep progressing while your busy SMEs review the material) and you send us written feedback. If necessary, we meet again (maybe by Skype this time) and discuss the feedback and raise any issues we have for completing the document.
How long does all this take?
Again this varies greatly depending on the project. An average project takes place over about two months, really short projects can be just a week or two and some projects last for years.
What happens when the project is done?
• We keep in touch and — we’ve already gone through the learning curve — are available for consultations when you need us. You can call to ask a question about how to explain something to a client, or ask for help with an email or a paragraph or two of content.
• You invite us for a cup of coffee to discuss your roadmap and brainstorm about the best way to approach the next project
So what's the difference between a "project" and "outsourcing"?
Outsourcing is when our technical writer works on-site at your company on an ongoing basis. Everything else is a project.
