Many companies spend months developing a product or completing a complex project, only to find themselves scrambling near the finish line to address what is sometimes viewed as a “necessary burden” the required regulatory, certification, maintenance, and operational documentation.
That last-minute dash may get the documentation completed, but at what cost to the project?
Even with a well-developed production plan and an established master drawing list, engineering delays, design changes, supplier updates, and evolving customer requirements can quickly affect technical documentation. When documentation is left until the end of the program, those changes can lead to unnecessary rework, additional cost, and increased schedule risk.
Plan Documentation Alongside Engineering
One of the most effective ways to reduce documentation risk is to involve your technical publications team or documentation service provider earlier in the project.
Consider these steps:
- Validate customer and end-user requirements early. Identify formatting requirements, graphic standards, delivery formats, and applicable specifications such as S1000D, XML-based requirements, PDF deliverables, or customer-specific standards.
- Identify applicable regulatory and industry requirements. Determine what documentation will ultimately be required for certification, operation, maintenance, or customer acceptance.
- Establish approved templates and publication standards. Reliable templates provide consistency and create a solid foundation that can often be leveraged on future programs.
- Develop a clear scope of work and bookplan. Define the manuals, sections, illustrations, source data, responsibilities, and deliverables before documentation production accelerates.
- Establish engineering and documentation milestones. Coordinating documentation milestones with engineering releases helps reduce unnecessary rewriting and illustration changes.
- Track progress throughout the program. A bookplan, burndown chart, or other tracking method provides visibility into completed work, outstanding source data, and areas that could affect the delivery schedule.
- Allow adequate time for quality control. Technical review, editing, formatting, illustration checks, cross-references, and final QC should be planned activities, not something squeezed into the final days before delivery
Documentation Shouldn’t Be the Last Step
Technical documentation is often the final deliverable, but that doesn’t mean it should be the final activity.
When technical writers, illustrators, engineering teams, and project managers begin coordinating earlier in the program, documentation can develop alongside the product. Changes can be incorporated as they occur, missing source information can be identified sooner, and potential schedule issues become visible before they turn into last-minute problems.
For complex aerospace, defense, transportation, and manufacturing programs, this approach can be particularly important. Maintenance manuals, Instructions for Continued Airworthiness (ICA), illustrated parts information, operating procedures, and other technical publications frequently depend on engineering data coming from multiple disciplines and at different stages of maturity.
Waiting until engineering is “finished” before beginning documentation can simply move the schedule pressure from one team to another.
Build Documentation Into the Project Plan
The goal isn’t to eliminate engineering changes, they’re part of virtually every complex program. The goal is to create a documentation process capable of absorbing those changes without putting the final delivery at risk.
Planning technical publications early gives your team time to establish requirements, organize source data, develop content, coordinate reviews, and perform the quality checks necessary to deliver accurate and usable documentation.
Don’t wait until the finish line to discover how much documentation is still left to complete.
AEC Inc. has supported technical documentation programs for more than 35 years, helping organizations add experienced technical writing, illustration, desktop publishing, and quality-control capabilities when and where they’re needed.
Let’s Discuss Your Documentation Requirements.