You can take advantage of the simple explanations of complex situations that brings you the SICPers blog and podcast, the Chiron Codex videos, and the range of books on software engineering linked in the sidebar. Empower your customers, developers, ops, and support staff with high-quality documentation created by a writer with a proven track record at Apple, Facebook, ARM, Oxygen8, and beyond. An author who goes into enough depth on software engineering to get a PhD. Then, take ownership of the documentation, and curate a knowledge hub that keeps information flowing throughout your organisation.
Your Problem
Your development team is slowed down, your customers are frustrated, and your support team is constantly banging down the door. Nobody can find the information they need, and they struggle to talk to each other to work it out.
One cause is that your documentation’s siloed. The ops team maintains a wiki, and some parts are up to date while others…not so much. The developers gave up on their wiki months ago, and use a combination of header comments in the source, with trawling through Slack chat logs. Meanwhile, your user guide authors are part of the marketing department, and you can’t even see what systems they use.
All of that means that they all develop their own styles, their own information structures, and their own jargons and phrases to talk about the software. Not only is different information in different siloes, it’s in different languages. A support engineer can’t work out why a customer’s telling them that a product won’t save, when the software deals in SKUs, and the developers can’t see how any of that corresponds to the entities in the comment docs.
Your Solution
The first phase is a fixed-fee documentation audit. I take a look at your current documentation landscape, discuss the problems and goals with the team, and create a bespoke, prioritized roadmap to produce a unified information architecture and publication pipeline. Then you’re free to decide how we work together to get there.
The end goal is a single platform that produces documentation that follows my extended version of the Diátaxis framework: in addition to accounting for different contexts and ways of engaging with the documentation, I also consider the different audiences, so that a single documentation repository serves customers and internal stakeholders alike, with strict guards to ensure that no internal secrets accidentally get into the user manual.
The documentation repository is version controlled and continuously published, so everybody has up-to-date information. Using a single source makes it easy to adopt a single, ubiquitous language, so that everybody uses the same words to talk about the same concepts.
Get Started
Learn more about how to escape the siloed documentation trap in the white paper, “The Hidden Cost of Documentation Silos: how fragmented information drains your engineering budget”. Find a slot to book an initial, no-obligation chat, and then let’s fix your docs and unblock your team! Discounted rates are available for projects published under a free software license.
