Services / Outsourcing

Outsourcing: Making Product Documentation Work for You

You’ve spent the required investment on your product. You ship it to your customers. When your customers open the box, the first thing they look for is the product documentation. Oops, you haven’t invested in developing your product’s documentation. Time-to-market constraints, improper budgeting, moving targets—these factors, and others, contribute to poor documentation. Nevertheless, your product documentation is indicative of the product itself. Chances are when your customers see shoddy documentation, they think shoddy product.

Product documentation matters. You can invest to produce it properly up-front or pay the price later by tying up your support lines.

Technical documentation is necessary for any software or hardware product—from internal requirements documents, functional specifications, and design documents to external end-user (customer) product documents. "If your program isn't worth documenting, it probably isn't worth running." (Nagler 1995)

There are hundreds of hi-tech companies in the Ottawa area investing millions of dollars on their product development. It makes business sense for these companies to concentrate on developing their product. Outsourcing product documentation allows hi-tech companies to focus on their core competency, rather than attempting to develop technical documentation expertise in-house.

Outsourcing documentation development makes sound business sense for the following reasons:

• You wouldn’t want Technical Writers to develop your software. Nor do you want Software Engineers developing your product documentation. Technical Writing contractors, with their broad range of experience, hit the ground running. There’s no need to factor in excessive amounts of ramp-up time.
  
  
• Technical Writing contractors often have cross-functional expertise and in-depth knowledge of project management, workflow and process improvement, needs analysis, information and instructional design, training, formative usability, usability and testing, graphics, and automated documentation builds. Technical Writing contractors are also conversant with many tools and media.
  
  
• Technical Writing contractors can work off-site, thereby reducing your operational costs, including hardware, software, space, telephone, and so forth. They can also participate in onsite meetings as required. Statutory holidays, vacation, project downtimes are not billable hours. And Technical Writing contractors don’t collect benefits.
  
  
• Businesses have their own ebbs and flows. With outsourcing, Technical Writing contractors can be released from projects without being laid off. They can be brought back onboard at anytime to pick up where they left off.
  
  

Investing in documentation throughout the product development cycle just makes sense. Outsourcing your documentation development is cheaper, better, and faster. And it means you don’t waste critical resources on developing documentation in-house.

Contact Digital Inkwell and let us help you outsource your documentation requirements.