Workflow and Copyediting Time

It's copyediting time for me. On my team, that means a lot of topics are all now ready for me to do what might be my final edit pass over them—in fact, half of the documentation set for this product is ready. The other half will be ready in about a month, and I'll have some brief amount of time to review them all before the final handoff date. I don't know how other teams work; it would make sense to spread this out more evenly throughout the writing cycle, but the way the documentation process works it's pretty much impossible.
Our process works this way. After we have worked out what we're going to write, the writers create topics based on specs and interaction with the product team (we're all on the same floor of our building). When a topic is basically filled out, the writer sends the topic to the other writers, the manager, and me for peer review. We all make comments, and this is where I do my developmental edit for the topic. The writer incorporates our comments into the topic and marks it as ready for tech review.
We have a few tech reviews that are scheduled into the product team's time. Each tech review lasts about a week. When we reach the tech review time, all the topics that are marked as ready for review are sent to the subject matter experts for review. In this product cycle, we have only two reviews so each review gets half of the documentation set. After the review, the writers incorporate comments and mark the topics as ready to be copyedited. Because the writers work pretty closely with the product team throughout the writing cycle, there usually aren't many big changes to the docs at this point.
So that's where we are now—I have a big queue of topics to edit that I would like to finish before Christmas, because the writers are busy working on the new topics that need developmental edits and I don't like to rush those. Fortunately, copyediting goes pretty quickly after all the reviews each topic has had.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 07, 2007
  Dear Mr Harry Mille, Greetings.

1. How do you get your documents  for copyediting? (how do you actully see the work of your wirters) Do you see the work in IE, copy and past the content in word or oppen office, then do the edit?
2. How do you send the contents' comments back to your writers?
3. How do your writers effect your comments? I mean once they recieve your comments from you. Thanks in advance, Muralidharan Kuppuswami from INDIA

• Anonymous
  August 08, 2007
  Hello Muralidharan, We have a content management/source control system that holds all the Word documents. The writers check their Word files in, and then I check them out, edit them in Word with Track Changes on, and check them back in. The writers review the edits and incorporate them, and then mark the topics as ready for the next step. Since we all work in the same hallway, we often talk about how to structure topics before or during the writing phase, and we can talk about why I made some of the developmental edits I did. We used to use Visual Source Safe for our content management system, but then we switched to a different system that was built in-house.

• Anonymous
  August 30, 2007
  Dear Harry Miller, Greetings and great feeling to see your response. Thanks for the same.

• Anonymous
  September 03, 2008
  Thanks for a great insight into the technical documentation process!