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

Technical writers can be invaluable partners across the product development life cycle.

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

Constraints are the boundaries of your project. They’re usually expressed in terms of cost, time and scope,

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?

A Documentation Plan defines what you’re expected to deliver – that is, the scope of your project, who your stakeholders are, and the process you’re going to follow to deliver the project.

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

One of the first things that any good writer should do before they put pen to paper is create a Documentation Plan. This key document defines the scope of your project (the documents you’re going to write, who the intended audience is, etc.) and the process you’ll follow to execute the project.

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

technical writing is a definable, repeatable, predictable process. It can be planned, scheduled and executed in a manner that leads to predictable outcomes, quality and timing.