- Email: contact@3di-info.com
- Telephone: 01483 211533
Technical Authoring
3di has the expertise to scope, resource, manage, and deliver documentation projects to meet your time, budget and quality targets. Above all things at 3di, we value our ability to deliver successful projects for our customers. Our project-managed teams are able to operate at your premises or remotely, on a short-term or long-term basis.
We tailor our service to ensure the right approach is designed for your specific needs. Once set up, we regularly monitor that it is working to meet your objectives. We invest in the project management skills of our staff and encourage them to learn and research the latest tools and approaches.
3di can offer both tactical and strategic approaches to meeting your technical documentation needs. For example, a tactical approach might be to scope and deliver an online help system for a fixed price. A strategic approach might be a fully outsourced authoring service.
If you have an established documentation process, we will be pleased to work in line with this. If not, we will use our in-house process based on the industry-standard Information Mapping® methodology. This has been applied successfully on projects ranging from development of software user guides to intranet-based e-learning programmes and ERP implementations. Your project will have its own agreed project plan, a shared tool that will reflect your requirements. We will agree realistic expectations and work professionally to meet and, wherever possible, exceed them.
We will establish a project-managed 3di authoring team to satisfy the specific needs of your project and take account of the:
A 3di project manager will be responsible for agreeing the best mix of experience and skills with you and will then use the 3di network of associates to build the best possible authoring team for the project. You will have a single point of contact at 3di, and each team member's role will be clearly defined in the project plan.
3di can deliver your technical documentation project using a wide range of tools and communication technology. Our policy is to use and recommend 'best of breed' software solutions for each customer situation.
Contact us today to find out how our project management skills can be applied to your documentation project.
Documentation projects need managing effectively for several reasons:
When customers use 3di services, they normally have specific deliverables, budget, and timescales in mind. What they need from us is also different each time. Because we cannot replicate each product, as you do on a production line in a factory, the only way to efficiently achieve quality every time is to replicate the processes involved.
It is the application of project management skills that enable us to replicate the processes and so produce a high-quality but different product for each customer every time.
Documentation projects often need more than one business or technical author to complete the work on time. To improve productivity, authors might need support from other specialists, such as a technical editor, technical illustrator or DTP expert. The 3di project manager will be responsible for agreeing the best mix of experience and skills with the customer and then using the 3di network of associates to build the best possible authoring team.
During the last few years, 3di has built and managed teams for companies including Motorola, RS Components, Alcatel-Lucent, the Environment Agency and Roche. We can build and manage technical authoring teams that have specialist knowledge of areas such as SAP, pharmaceuticals, and banking compliance, electronics, power generation and telecommunications.
The in-house team at 3di is focused on providing the project management and consultancy needed to effectively scope and deliver our specialist projects. We have more than ten years experience of working with freelance technical and business authors. We are confident that we can build the right team to meet each customer's different industry knowledge, audience, and technology needs.
Delivering a successful documentation project is as much about having a clear authoring method as it is about strong project management. For each document to be effective, it needs to be:
3di customers know that we will take care of these important considerations, and others, whenever they ask us to carry out a project. In situations where our customers have established methods, processes and house styles in place, 3di is happy to comply with these. In others situations, where nothing is in place, we will propose to apply our own methodology, Information Mapping.
The Information Mapping method offers a proven approach to the analysis, organisation, and visual presentation of information. The approach is based on research into how the human mind actually reads, processes, remembers and retrieves information. At 3di we use the information mapping method as our internal standard and apply the method to customer projects whenever possible.
Using the right tool for the job is as important for building documentation as it is for anything else. The range of tools available has increased significantly in recent years with more ‘niche' tools and a number of ‘suites' of tools becoming established.
At 3di, we are tools-independent, committed only to recommending the most appropriate tool for the project. We keep a close eye on technology development in the market and have access to the experience of many authors who will have worked with new tools for a wide range of companies.
Recent 3di projects have seen us using:
For each documentation project, our team will consider the following technology factors:
Contact us today to find out how our project management skills can be applied to your documentation project.
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