tekom-Jahrestagung 2012 - ActiveDoc

Lokalisierung und Übersetzung / Localization
LOC 24
Tutorial
The steps are:
To succeed with quality
management, you need
a committed team!
But you also need your
manager’s approval
About fulfilling
requirements and
getting satisfied
customers
Why goals?
Eight steps to get in control of quality
Susanne Dahlén, IAR Systems, Sweden, chair of the Swedish Society for Technical
Communication (FTI)
Are you in control of the quality aspects of your user documentation?
This tutorial works through a practical method in eight steps that can
help documentation departments take control of everything from defining
quality requirements, quality assurance mechanisms and quality
controls. It also sketches various approaches to measuring quality.
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Get a “buy-in” from your co-workers
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Come up with your quality definition
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Set your strategic goals
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Define your quality requirements
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Specify quality assurance mechanisms and controls
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Set priorities and rate your requirements
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Build your quality plan
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Measure the quality
These steps might sound simple but are carefully chosen to guide your
work by setting a foundation and a vision for quality, and to get in-depth
practical methods in place. The focus lies on building a robust process,
where quality assurance and controls are integrated in the production
of documentation and where all quality aspects are collected in a quality
plan.
This quality plan gives you an overview and can help you identify gaps
and potential improvements in your process and help you prioritize
between them.
Each step will be elaborated with principles and examples and for many
of the steps, time to work on your own and group discussions will be
included in the tutorial.
Get a “buy-in” from your co-workers
When it comes to documentation, you and your co-workers are the subject
matter experts and you probably have a very good idea about what
works when it comes to your procedures etc, and what does not. If the
documentation team is committed and part of developing the “quality
plan”, you are more likely to get a success story.
You need time and resources set aside for this type of work, so you must
get your manager’s approval for it. Try to make it as simple as possible
for your manager to approve your request. In other words, this is what
we want to achieve, these would be the benefits, and these are the costs.
Come up with your quality definition
It is important that you have YOUR definition clear to you. Because the
definition is a starting point, a principle that you can lean on, a base for
your work on and a guiding light.
Set your strategic goals
A quality definition is not sufficient; you must also know what to aim at.
The goals simply clarify the scope and purpose of your documentation.
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