When Aaron and I worked at The Company That Shall Not Be Named, the technical publications group was under the umbrella of the sales department. Yes, you read that correctly. And it wasn’t a case of the company being so small that tech pubs didn’t fit under any other group — this was a huge, multinational firm.
Being part of sales meant that the technical publications group was expected to make money. Which was a completely foolish notion. Unless you’re selling hard copy manuals and people are buying them, there’s no way that documentation will make a company money. On paper, the technical publications group was a cost centre; we didn’t make money and therefore our budget was pretty low. We couldn’t get licenses for the tools that we needed to do our jobs, and even attending conferences or taking training was out of the question.
Unfortunately, that view of documentation is incredibly short sighted. The true value of documentation, and the people who create it, is not how much money it makes a company but how much money it saves the company. Documentation doesn’t just explain how to use a product. It’s the first line of support for many customers.
Good documentation — whether a manual, a help file, a wiki, or a knowledge base — enables a user to solve a problem for themselves, rather than make a costly support call. It saves money by allowing support personnel to focus their attention and energies on the more difficult problems that users may encounter; ones that aren’t or can’t be covered in the documentation.
Even more than that, good documentation can be a sales tool. In a couple of cases, the documentation that I wrote was mentioned favourably in software reviews — as an effective guide to configuring and using the applications, and also as a guide to the capabilities of the software. When I left one company, a salesperson made a point of mentioning that the user guide helped him better understand the software, which helped close a couple of sales.
What’s your experience in this area? Feel free to leave a comment.
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5 Responses
Documentation = revenue driver by Communications from DMN
January 31st, 2008 at 5:05 am
1[...] to a previous post, here’s a very interesting opinion on documentation being a revenue driver from Adobe’s [...]
Doing more with less: another perspective by Communications from DMN
February 11th, 2008 at 5:07 am
2[...] That Shall Not Be Named, we were incredibly constrained by a number factors. As mentioned in a previous post, the documentation department was part of the sales organization. We were expected to make money, [...]
Measuring the ROI of documentation by Communications from DMN
February 14th, 2008 at 5:09 am
3[...] it’s hard to put a value on documentation. As mentioned in a previous post, the value of documentation isn’t in the money that it brings in but the money that it saves. [...]
Documentation and its hidden power by Communications from DMN
August 19th, 2008 at 5:17 am
4[...] as I’ve mentioned before in this space, the true value of documentation is how much money it saves a company. Documentation [...]
technicalpublications
April 2nd, 2010 at 1:11 pm
5I couldn’t agree with you more. We’ve just finished a project where the MOD were the end user and we only got called in because they kept rejecting the hashed documentation that they kept being presented with. If the engineering company had decided on providing quality technical publications from the start of the project they’d have saved themselves a lot of wasted time and money!
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