Let me know if you have any lessons-learned in adapting Agile methods to your content team.  Ideally, you would able to establish an independent Scrum to prioritize and release deliverables that matter most to your customers.

Thanks,

Eric

Excellent article – I really appreciate your knowledge about Agile methods to content writers, I have bookmarked it for later viewing and forwarded it on.

Cheers.

An executable example is the perfect kind of documentation.  As another example of good documentation, the on-line help given for Microsoft Excel has been very informative without being verbose, in part because it contains some excellent examples for each of the functions.

Thanks for your comments.

Eric

I particularly liked the Content Development Manifesto. We’ve found the implementation of executable examples to be one of the most often used supporting content in our plug-in. So much, in fact, that I hear immediately when one of them doesn’t work quite right! No worries, it’s all good collaboration and feedback.

Anyway, I really liked how you related the Agile methods to content writers – well done and thanks!

Virginia

http://www.xaware.org

Hope to see you there!

Mike

The argument for a technical support person to be the product owner for technical documentation may be off-kilter.  After all, a Product Manager is responsible for the whole product, which includes both software and documentation, so it seems more natural to have this person be the product owner for the technical documentation.  However, my professional experience includes several years as a software developer, a product manager, and a technical support engineer.  In surveying that experience, I find myself recalling a lot of customer frustration on the telephone because the product documentation was poorly written.  Hence, while it is counter-intuitive thinking, I find myself trusting the judgment of a technical support engineer more than I trust the judgment of a detached Product Manager to know what kind of technical documentation the customer needs to read.  Your experience may be different and so you may think differently on this point.

Sorry for the omission.