- Read the Marketing Requirements Document (MRD) and functional specification. The MRD should list out clearly the documentation requirements.
- On the basis of MRD and functional specs, create a documentation plan that includes
- Product name, scope, and purpose
- Milestone dates
- List of documents that will be created and/or updated. If the project is about updating an existing product, list the features to be documented. If the project is about releasing a new product, additional planning is required. There are multiple customer documentation deliverable types a project could require, ranging from a single-paged addendum to a context-sensitive online help system.
- Features that will be documented
- Work estimate and committed schedule for documenting each feature or completing each document
- Committed documentation milestones
- Documentation Reviewers including review schedule. There are 2 ways to conduct a review, collect edits individually from each reviewer or hold a review meeting to review everyone's comments. Multiple reviews may be required. You can also use Adobe's Shared review process to collect feedbacks from multiple reviewers.
- Depending on the program, include any training material needed for the Launch.
- Risks, assumptions, and dependencies. Include the following: Main risks of the documentation project (e.g. last minute feature additions), probability of each risk, Impact of each risk, Risk mitigation plan, Owner of the mitigation plan)
- Affected BOMs and/or document numbers
- Doc approval process and approvers (outside the tech pubs team)
- Documentation delivery and distribution plan.
- Distribute the plan to the core team members: PLM (Marketing), R&D lead (Engineering), and PM (Program Manager) who will review and approve the plan.
- After the approval, create the draft document by attending the core team meetings, interacting with the application, studying design documents, asking questions to the testers/developers.
- Send the draft to the reviewers identified in the documentation plan.
- Update the documents as per the review comments, address all the major and critical documentation CRs and defects identified during the documentation validation.
- Obtain the documentation approval from the designated reviewers/approvers.
- Generate the final version.
- Check in the final document into the build branch.
