Technical Writing Process: The simple, five-step guide that anyone can use to create technical documents such as user guides, manuals, and procedures

If your project involves multiple deliverables (and most technical writing projects do), your Documentation Plan will be supported by a Deliverables Matrix, which lists every document to be written and their key attributes.

Audience defines the characteristics of the people who will use the documentation.

In a documentation project, focusing on the audience requires asking the right questions, such as: Who’s going to read this document? What’s the education level of the audience, and what are its top need-to-know priorities? Do these users need a complete reference or just a getting started guide?

The Deliverables Worksheet, Deliverables Matrix and Status Tracker are designed for use in projects with multiple deliverables,

The process is intended to introduce formality, structure and predictability into technical documentation projects. This comes at an upfront cost, of course – it takes time to create Documentation Plans and Documentation Schedules. However, the benefits of adding structure quickly become apparent, as the project produces better quality deliverables

Improve predictability of technical writing projects.

Requirements are the high-level needs that your documentation project must fulfil

Assumptions, Constraints and Dependencies are where the logic underlying your planning and scheduling is made explicit.

Below each step is a set of activities that needs to be accomplished to complete the step. Below the activities are tools and outputs. Tools are the templates that you use to execute the activities, such as a Documentation Plan for capturing your project’s scope. Templates for the tools are provided in Appendix A – Templates as screenshots. An outp