Who Benefits From Using a Professional to Develop Good IT User Documentation?

Who Benefits From Using a Professional to Develop Good IT User Documentation

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However, IT projects have an unfortunate reputation among the public for failing to deliver. If we are to improve this performance, then we need to look at how to improve how a project is managed and resourced. Studies have revealed that up to 40% of all information systems developed have online Help written by a non-trained writer, and we believe this is one of the reasons why so many IT projects fail.

Is your project likely to succeed or fail?

Studies have shown that, in the UK, only 16% of IT projects hit all their targets. While performance is improving, the challenges are becoming greater.

Some of the main concerns we hear from project managers are:

1. Completing their project on time.

2. Completing their project to budget.

3. Finding the right team.

4. Making users productive:

Training their end users in new procedures.

Providing incentives for people to change.

Overcoming resistance to change.

Communicating the reasons for change.

You can address these issues by working with technical communicators.

Help others to understand what's going on

One of the most essential deliverables that IT professionals must provide is documentation. This is because:

50% of projects involve business process change, organisational change or work design. People need information and training that enables them to be effective in their jobs. This means capturing best practice and specialist knowledge, recording it clearly and communicating it to the relevant people in the most effective way.

30% of projects involve package modification, and many organisations want to expand the usefulness of built-in Help and error messages to include information unique to their situation. Documentation transfers information to your clients and users so they can access and understand the system now and in the future.

Technical communicators:

Spend significant amounts of time analysing users and helping them understand the new system.

Communicate the needs and views of the users back to the developers. .

Contribute to the design of the user interface, assisting with the usability of the system. .

The result:

1. The customer gets a better product with a reduced cost of ownership - because they can use the online assistance to be more productive. 2. You are able to create a system that is more relevant and usable.

The Sales Process

Good documentation helps the selling process:

Good documentation leads to better customer satisfaction and helps you to retain your customers. It is one of the main ways your corporate image will be presented to the client during the life of the product.

Apart from the software itself, the users documents and Help are often the only things the client sees, once the salesman has left and the packaging has been thrown away.

The sales team will be able to show prospects that :

Your documentation meets the customer's requirements.

Your documentation meets the users' requirements.

Supporting customers after the sales is important to you, and your organisation does this professionally.

If users get stuck, the online user assistance system will enable them to get unstuck quickly and easily.

Your organisation understands what its customers want to do i.e. the tasks they want to complete.

The Training Team

Any training can focus on the key points, and these will be reinforced after the training by just accessing the Help system.

CBT and animated examples can be included to provide performance support and just-in-time training.

The Development Team

The software development team will be given a user's perspective on how easy it is to use the software, and what concepts and processes are difficult to understand.

Help can be embedded into the application, making it easier for people to use.

The Technical Support Team

Call to support desks can be reduced by:Including commonly asked support questions in the Help system. Linking the Help system to a support Web site. Providing a natural language search engine in the Help system. Embedding Help into the software and making it more intuitive to use.Users of systems with Help written by technical communicators use the online Help up to 54% more often, and they rate the quality of the Help more highly than do users of Help files written by someone who wasn't a professional Technical Communicator. In one study, 210 support calls were saved annually per client, which represented an annual saving of $2 million.(c) Cherryleaf Technical Authors and Documentation Specialists 2006.Ellis Pratt co-owns a technical writing consultancy called Cherryleaf Ltd. We work with developers of software who are afraid of losing their customers and frustrated with the cost of supporting them. See Cherryleaf Technical Authors and Documentation Specialists.http://www.articlesbase.com/computers-articles/who-benefits-from-using-a-professional-to-develop-good-it-user-documentation-4398315.html

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