Writing Services

Whether you need a user guide for your software implementation, a help system for your production engineers, or a technical presentation for your marketing team, we can help. We can help you develop knowledge bases and content management systems to capture and preserve your business-critical information.

We can help you define your audience, the materials you need, and prepare everything for you. Then, on completion, we will not only deliver the materials we have developed, we will ensure that your designated staff members fully understand how to update and improve the resources.

Operating Procedures

Operating procedures (SOPs) offer a roadmap to the way in which a task should be done. They may include business as well as technical information and should focus primarily on what the person performing the task has to do. How do I remove a fuel filter? What tools do I need? Sometimes, procedures can be given graphically as a drawing or series of images. For other, more complex and abstract tasks, graphics alone are not enough.

Standards

Whether you are interested in ISO certification or just want to make sure your teams know what they should be doing, standards are important. Have a quality issue? Do your production workers know what you expect? Have three coding teams working on two continents? If you have clear standards, you can help ensure all the systems components will work together.

Business Processes

What happens when....? Do the members of your staff really know what they are supposed to do? What's the next step when...? Having well-documented, easy to follow, and easy to access written procedures can reduce rework, aid in customer retention, and significantly cut down on mistakes.

Systems Documentation

Has your company created custom applications and systems that work great but don't have any documentation? Relying on "tribal knowledge" and change logs that may only indicate "mod to code" is risky business. What will happen to your systems when the "tribe" moves on?

Software Requirements

What is the system expected to do? What is the system user expected to do? Clearly written requirements documents are the key to communication between your systems programmers, your business units, and your customers.

Who is the Audience?

The keys to developing useful materials are in knowing the audience and understanding the goals for the materials.

A software application may need both a help system and a training manual. Both are related but have quite different goals and should be written differently. Without clear distinctions and an accurate understanding of the audience, even the most well-written materials won't be useful.

What is the purpose of the document? Is it intended to be put on a shelf, only to be looked at when needed? This is a valid purpose. Most reference materials are written with this idea in mind. When was the last time you picked up an encyclopedia just to browse through the pages? Yet, if you want to know the specific commands used to enable a router, the vendor reference manuals could easily be one of the first places you would look.

What about training materials? Who is the training for?

Are you interested in making sure your administrative staff is familiar with your data entry policies and knows how to accurately catalog entries? Or do you need to provide materials for your programmers who will be working on your data entry system?

Both could use the same illustrations, screen captures, and even the same functional descriptions. But where the administrative staff needs to know how to use the system, the programming staff needs to know how to fix, modify, and enhance it.

Help Systems

Everybody needs help from time to time. Sometimes, the help system is useful; sometimes it's not. Ever tried to research a problem only to get a "Please contact your system administrator" message. Ok. Suppose you are the system administrator. What then?

Software Translations

In translating software, it is critical that the translator distinguish between the code and the display text. This can frequently present some difficulties since functions may carry the same names as value labels. Have a database interface that you would like translated for your Chinese business partner? That's the easy part. Does your database support Chinese characters? How will your English-speaking staff deal with the Chinese entries? We have solutions.

Training Materials

Training materials are teaching tools. To learn, a person must be able to understand not only what should happen, but also the problems which may arise and how to deal with them. Training materials may include presentations, workbooks, and reference materials all designed to help the learner achieve a defined level of proficiency in a task.

Regulatory Documentation

In regulated industries, documentation is critical. Requirements must be documented, substantiated by testing, and the test results documented against the stated requirements. Moreover, the documentation must adhere to the regulations for the industry. FDA regulations for medical devices have different reporting requirements than for the SEC for financial transactions.

Technical Manuals

Like systems documentation, technical manuals are intended to be used only when needed and should include a full discussion, not just a few notes. Who is going to use the manual? When might they need it? What access will they have to the materials? It makes no sense to put a a full set of manuals on a protected intranet site when the people who will need them are field technicians with no remote access.

RFP/RFI Responses

Requests for Proposals (RFP) and Requests for Information (RFI) are a standard way of soliciting bids for many companies and government agencies. Answering an RFP or RFI requires not only clear writing, but a clear sense of time. If responses are due at 2:00 pm on Tuesday, and your response arrives at 2:05 pm, it won't be accepted. Meeting all the requirements is required, no more, no less.