DocQment

WritersUA has published its 2006 Skills and Technologies Survey results. For the first time, quality assurance is in the top ten skills.

The November, 2006 issue of the STC UK Chapter newsletter has an article by Andrew Marlow, “Quality Assessment,” on several levels of measurement of quality in technical documentation.

There is a customer satisfaction survey for documentation online at GE Industrial. The survey is available in seven languages and addresses both software and hardware manuals.

The May issue of STC’s Intercom magazine includes the Quest for Quality column, which addresses how to build a customer satisfaction measurement survey. The example is an information product.

Diane Evans, member of the Puget Sound chapter and the Quality and Process Improvement SIG, published the article “Document Control Systems” in the April 2006 issue of STC’s Intercom magazine. The article reviews configuration management, document control software, and search engines and emphasizes the importance of business rules in effective operation of document control systems.

The “Documentation Checklist/Audit Form” by James Eiland supports a method of quality assurance for developing documents. The checklist was created specifically for Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). There are numbered sections which correspond to paragraph heads in a typical template for an SOP. However, the checklist could be made more generic and apply to any type of documentation, or be customized for other specific types. 
 
The checklist incorporates provisions from ISO 9000 for continuous improvement and client satisfaction measurement. 
 
How would you customize this checklist for use by your organization in assuring quality of documentation and satisfaction of your customers? Please leave comments, and the QPI SIG will aggregate the comments received in a more generic checklist to help guide authors, editors, instructors, and reviewers to verify and validate technical documentation efforts in a standardized manner. 
 
Please suggest in your comments also the points in the documentation life cycle where the checklist could be used.