Lessons learned in planning and managing a documentation project

10 Sep

Posted by Scott as authoring, documentation, opinion, project management, technical communication

In June of this year, a project to update the Ubunutu community wiki — dubbed “Summer of Documentation” — was undertaken by a few member of the Ubuntu community. Unfortunately, the project didn’t turn out as expected. Work got done, but not as much as hoped.

The author of the post discussing what went wrong offers the these reasons for why the project didn’t work out as well as hoped:

Failure to advertise and gain community support

Not having a good plan to get workers started

Lack of clear cut goals and targets

Volunteer burnout

Those are good lessons for any documentation project — community or otherwise:

A plan, even an outline is a must. It’s you’re map. Without it, you really have no clear idea of where you’re going and how you’re going to get there.
Goals and targets are a must, but be realistic about them. Some people like to create SMART goals. Use whatever works for you, but try to stick to the targets and have a backup plan when things start to slip.
As for burnout … I’ve talked about that before.

As for the failure to advertise and get support from the community, like many Ubuntu users I hadn’t heard of this project and I try to follow as much news as possible. Not that I would have been able to help out, but … Regardless, in any documentation project you need to make people aware of the fact that documentation is being written and that you’ll need their help. Maybe not writing, but reviewing and testing the documentation. In this case, you’ll need to work with SMEs and testers to set goals and targets for their part of the project.

Do you have anything to add? If so, feel free to leave a comment.