"Managing Your Documentation Projects" by JoAnn Hackos -- an overview

Everyone in the office where Tim and I work is issued a copy of JoAnn Hackos's Managing Your Documentation Projects. In this blog post, I'll provide some general remarks about this often-issued, not-so-often-read book.

JoAnn Hackos's Managing Your Documentation Projects (hereafter, MYDP) discusses technical writing from a managerial, strategic perspective, with emphasis on implementing a process for documentation development. MYDP provides a 5-level model for assessing the maturity of your documentation team.

It is important to say what MYDP is not. MYDP is not a manual for teaching you how

to write clearly (if that's what you want, check out Jacques Barzun's Simple and Direct). MYDP is not a discussion of the difficulties faced by technical writers (if that's what you want, check out T.A. Rickard's A Guide to Technical Writing). If you approach this book expecting to learn how to improve your writing of procedures or how to explain concepts more accurately, you will be disappointed. This book does not provide much guidance regarding how to write.

MYDP provides strategic, long-term guidance about how to set and meet goals, and how to assess your team's effectiveness in your organization. It is not possible to overstate this book's emphasis on strategy: this book is more The Art of War than OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual.

At the beginning of MYDP, Hackos details the benefits of high-quality.documentation: frees up resources and saves money by reducing the cost of customer support. High-quality publications make information more accessible and reduce-training costs. MYDP presents a scenario wherein a company's poor, hastily-written documentation increases the cost of support and the company nearly loses its business. Soon enough, the company hires a documentation firm to produce good documentation, and the cost of doing business lowers dramatically. This book is about making the case for good documentation, ensuring that the proper management procedures are in place to facilitate that end, and communicating the benefits of good documentation to managers.

This book will not teach you how to write. This book is about bringing documentation projects in on time and under budget, assessing the quality of your documentation team, getting the best out of the people you have, and hiring the right people to minimize your weaknesses.

JoAnn Hackos's Managing Your Documentation Projects is a book primarily about strategic approaches to technical writing. It provides a conceptual 5-stage framework for determining the maturity of your writing organization.

In future blog posts, we will discuss Hackos's book and 5-level publications-maturity model in greater detail. We will discuss the book's strengths as well as its weaknesses, and we will discuss the debt it owes to Carnegie-Mellon's Capabilities and Maturity Model.





Hackos, JoAnn, Managing Your Documentation Projects (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1994)