Project managers and technical writers are two distinct roles. One of my many skills as a technical writer is organisation. We juggle many tasks and switch between them with ease. People skills are essential when speaking with coders, engineers, and technicians of various shades. In the meantime, we manage a ream of documentation while taking instructions from SMEs. Occasionally, we meet a project manager who has had minimal exposure to technical documentation during a project.
If you’ve never planned the tech writing part of a project, ask your technical writer for help. When project managers and technical writers work together, it helps the project succeed (because it’s well documented) and improves support for everyone.
If you are one of the many project managers who have never worked with technical writers, remember that we are professionals. We will not tolerate technical documentation that fails to meet the needs of others.
So, if you have no direct experience with documentation or technical writers, consider:
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- Please talk with your TW(s) because their experience will provide you with a much-needed background in document management.
- To help plan the documentation, avoid creating timelines as you progress the project.
- TAs cannot pull documentation from a hat or generate a document from code.
- Please speak to the TW(s) to gauge how long it will take to review/write/edit a document. In my experience, many project managers overestimate timelines or, worse, underestimate deadlines. Always build in flexibility to allow for problems in the documentation process.
- Reviewing a document intended for transformation that exceeds 20 pages will take time (the general rule of thumb is 1 hour per page).
- The time required for writing
- Peer reviews
- Time to have the content technically reviewed
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