Ways of Reducing Costs

We appreciate that the regular appearance in the news of phrases like "economic slowdown", "job losses" and "recession" can have a sobering effect on everybody's preparedness to spend money - unless it's absolutely necessary. In such conditions, it can be difficult to convince one's finance director that having quality documentation is an absolute necessity.

Recognising this difficulty, Wordsworth have been trying to think of ways that companies can significantly reduce the costs associated with producing documentation without entirely sacrificing the goal of top quality deliverables.

Here's one suggestion: We've mentioned elsewhere on this site about the drawbacks of leaving it to your developers and engineers to design and write the manuals. However, with cost reductions in mind, you could opt for a hybrid solution. Wordsworth could come in and research your documentation needs, and then design an outline for the manual, a template for writing it, a draft of the chapter and section breakdown, and an example of the recommended writing style. We then pass this back to you, so that your own internal staff do the next stage of filling in the necessary information into the outline manual. Then, when this stage is complete, you bring Wordsworth back in for a professional review and edit of the draft manual, and putting the finishing touches to the manual, such as generating the Table of Contents, creating an Index, or inserting active links into an on-screen pdf version of the document.

In this way, you can save around a half to two thirds of the documentation development costs (at least, the external costs of having someone else do it for you), while still ending up with a quality documentation deliverable.

If you would like to discuss this or any other cost-reduction strategy, please contact Wordsworth to further investigate the possibilities.