Getting Content from SMEs

Working without existing documentation

If you're writing documentation for a brand new project with no previous documentation available, you have more work ahead of you. The manager responsible for producing the documentation has probably anticipated this as an issue. They may have brought you into the project development team or environment before the product has been completed, so that you have time to learn about it. Now might be the best time to create an outline of the documentation. If no good models exist for even an outline, you might take a look at documentation that has been produced by your company's competition and use the rough structure of that documentation as a starting point. Many companies post their documentation on their web site.

Work with others on the project team in a series of short meetings to hammer out a final outline that details the flow of the documentation. You should also figure out which SMEs to visit to learn more details about the different sections of the documentation. Make your meetings short and to the point because time is very valuable to developers. Then it's more detailed interviews with SMEs, and more querying for existing documentation -- all of which is cobbled together into one piece that goes out on a first draft review. You should include a cover letter with the draft that points out known issues and areas of weakness and includes an appeal to the reviewers to sit down with you and discuss further details as needed.

There are some variations on the process roughly described above. For example, if the product is a software application, you may be able to get a copy of the software or an emulator. You can then play with it to learn more about its functionality. The same may be true of other non-software products.