Your Writing Dept Blog Creating quality user documentation and putting the “M” in RTFM.

Tips for hiring an outsourced technical writing team to document your product or process

Consider the following factors before selecting an outsourced technical writing team to develop and/or maintain your technical or product documentation. Carefully selecting the right team of writers can make a difference in the success of a product launch as well as influence whether or not your product is successful in the marketplace. Keep in mind that technical writing teams are not one-size-fits-all organizations, so it’s up to you to take the time to find the right fit for your needs and organization.

Define why you need documentation
You first need to clearly establish why you need documentation for your product or procedure. Is it new documentation to support a newly developed product or do you need to improve existing documentation to further assist in customer support? Fully determine why you need to engage a technical documentation service provider before starting a writing project.

Engage the writing team early in the process
Many technical writers are all too familiar with being brought in late in the game of product development only to join in on the mad dash to the product delivery launch date. Bringing the writing team in early allows for better documentation and a better customer experience.

Establish your budget
Set realistic limits as to what you are going to spend on your documentation project, but understand that the final user guide is designed to support your product and if it falls short of your customer’s expectations, your product may not be well-received. So plan early for your documentation requirements and factor your ROI in the cost of the documentation. Planning to go on the cheap will usually get you into trouble. In budgeting, you need to consider if you want to build document templates and style guides as a part of the project. An experienced writing team will build in time for documentation review cycles. Generally, when scoping a writing project, a technical documentation outsourcing team will look at the estimated number of pages and calculate the time to complete the project, so it is important to represent your project as accurately as you can. Neither party wants to be surprised by price over runs because a project was scoped inaccurately.

Assign the internal support resources to the project
Writers from the outside your organization may be good writers, but they may not know your product the way you do, so set aside the time for your subject matter experts to participate in the documentation development process in an advisory role. Clearly define roles and responsibilities and get buy in from the subject matter experts.

Establish if you need a local writing resource
Consider if it is important to the success of the project to have a writer is on-site. Determine if the writer will need to have face-to-face meetings with your subject matter experts, or can they be on the other site of the country? For documenting some products and processes, location is not important.

Decide if you will require project management services
Determine if you want a formalized project management process or if the project does not warrant close supervision to keep the project on track. When developing a complex or large document suite, a project manager can help keep the project on track and free up the writer’s time for the actual writing. Although project management is an extra cost, it can keep the project moving in the right direction and keep it within budgetary restraints. Keep in mind that adding project management time into the estimate will generally include several hours per week to accommodate the project manager’s time above the technical writing efforts.

Your Writing Dept is a Sacramento-based writing firm that specializes in developing technical manuals and user guides. We like to say that we can be your tech writing team, without the overhead. Email us for more information about our services at info@yourwritingdept.com.

Additional Posts from Your Writing Dept

• InfoPorn: Presenting raw data with visually stimulating graphs
• Twitter: Is it killing good grammar?
• How many spaces after a period? One or two?
• Newspapers are dying but there’s still a need for good journalism
• Is there an error message for user manual failure?
• MS Office 2007 Hidden Treasure