TASK-ZINE

PRODUCT MANUALS DEFINED

2009-03-20T14:53:00.002-04:00

As a manufacturer or marketer, you may currently be contemplating what documentation your product will need. Depending on how complex your product is, and whether it’s designed for a consumer or commercial customer, you might need to produce only one manual, or a complete suite. Here is a suggested list of manuals, and what they should contain.

Quick Start Guides may be part of a User Manual or a standalone piece. Appropriate to both consumer and commercial equipment or software, they tell the user how to operate the basic controls and make the product work. They may also touch briefly on more advanced functions so that the reader can try them out. Some one-page guides are virtually “wordless”, using illustrations, numbers and arrows to show how to connect components together or work through setup menus.

Installation Manuals (other than software) are typically used by a manufacturer’s field service/installation personnel or factory-trained subcontractors. They are written for specialized commercial equipment such as medical scanners, boiler equipment or a recording studio mixing console, to name just a few examples. Calibration and customer acceptance procedures could also be included.

User Manuals are intended to give in-depth instruction for the proper operation of the equipment, but might include assembly information. An example of this would be a barbeque manual. User manuals should include safety warnings, either at the beginning and/or at specific points in the manual where they apply. Manuals for commercial equipment will be written for an educated audience with training in a particular field. Simple troubleshooting and minor maintenance information are often included. A monograph published by pharmaceutical companies to instruct doctors in the application of a particular drug could be another type of user manual.

Service Manuals are written for factory-trained personnel. They should contain safety information, particularly where electric shock, crushing, chemical or any other hazards may arise when servicing equipment. More often than not, they contain troubleshooting guides, exploded mechanical drawings and/or schematic diagrams (for example: hydraulic, pneumatic, electrical or electronic). Removal and replacement procedures for failed subassemblies are written and illustrated in detail. Calibration or alignment procedures could also be outlined as a follow-up to the replacement of a subassembly.

Overhaul and Maintenance Manuals should include instructions for performing preventive maintenance such as lubrication procedures or calibration checks). They should contain the same kind of safety information as service manuals. They may go one step further than service manuals by providing instructions for corrective maintenance (removal, overhaul & replacement) for failed subassemblies, down to the component replacement level. They may include troubleshooting charts, as well as calibration and alignment procedures.

This is by no means a strict guideline for producing your manuals, but it should provide a sense of what each type of manual typically includes. Once you decide to start on your documentation, use a technical writer who can work with your team to effectively communicate this information to the intended audience. Poorly written or formatted manuals will do harm to your company’s reputation and may leave you open to liability. Plan your manuals early in the design phase to ensure you have them available when the product ships.

PRODUCT MANUALS - WHO'S MAKING YOURS?

2009-03-20T14:26:00.003-04:00

Does this scenario sound familiar? Marketing has customers lined up to take the first shipments, engineering says they’re almost finished tweaking the final design and manufacturing is now starting to run prototypes through its process.

Business as usual: customers are waiting and everyone is scrambling to get a working, reliable product out the door. There are hurdles galore to overcome, including electromagnetic compatibility testing, regulatory approvals, development of in-house test programs and export clearances.

Through this organized chaos, some key activities get pushed to the bottom of the heap. Chances are, one of these is the production of manuals. In most cases, this function should largely fall upon the shoulders of the product designers. After all, they, better than anyone, should be able to describe how to install it, use it, maintain it and fix it. But wait! These are the people who are under the gun to get the product on the shipping dock. How are they going to find the time to write, illustrate and format a set of manuals?

There are three approaches that can be taken to get the technical documentation delivered with the product:
1. Designate an employee or hire someone to be an in-house technical writer. For this to work, the individual has to be dedicated to the task, and be able to talk to and understand engineers. Usually, they have a technical background themselves as well as prior technical writing experience.
2. Bring in an experienced contract technical writer either directly or through an agency. This individual works on-site, and for all intents and purposes is a temporary employee. There is an understanding that the individual is being hired for a defined period of time and works from a company-supplied space using company equipment. Agencies typically pay the individual an hourly rate plus benefits, then invoice the company at marked-up hourly rates.
3. Subcontract a technical writing firm that will work on-site as needed to gather information, but will typically work off-site to produce the finished manuals. They may have several people, such as writers and illustrators that they can parse work out to as needed to ensure it is completed on time. Hourly rates with a ceiling on total cost or fixed project milestone costs are negotiated before work commences.

Which works best? It all depends on your company’s circumstances. Larger organizations can afford to hire full-time writers, knowing that if circumstances change, severance costs can be covered. Similarly, they may not be deterred by high hourly rates that agencies charge, given the convenience of having someone else take care of administering benefits and payroll deductions. For medium and small companies, using a technical writing firm may be a better solution, because there is no commitment to continue using them if circumstances change. Nor is there a requirement to provide them with on-site office space or equipment, or pay benefits.

Delivery of technical manuals is often written into purchase contracts, or is a legal requirement due to safety information that they contain. As much as they seem to be a roadblock to getting a product to market, they must be addressed seriously. Don’t leave the planning or implementation of manual writing tasks until the design is complete. That’s too late! Even if the design is fluid, manuals can be “revved up” as needed and re-issued.

Plan to have resources available to work with the writer throughout the process. Bolster your resources if necessary to make that happen. People have a way of getting too busy when the crunch hits, forcing the writer to stop work. The last thing you want to have is product that can’t ship because the manuals aren’t ready.

TELL THE WORLD.....WRITE A BOOK!

2008-08-22T15:46:00.008-04:00

Chances are you're reading this because you're already a blogger, or are considering jumping into the blogging world.

As a weB LOG, the blog can be thought of as a chronological "captain's log" of events in your life or business, the contents of which get posted on the Web in bits and pieces as they occur. But wouldn't it be a good idea to put that in a more comprehensive, one-stop-shopping format so that others can learn from your entire experience?

There's a certain appeal to a book, whether it's the ability to curl up in a chair and read without the hum of a computer in the background, or the luxury of manually flipping paper pages to find the information you need. Many people prefer that to reading online. A series of blog postings doesn't work for them.

That's a potential market for you. If you've got something interesting to say, then you need to write a book to reach those people. With self-publishing sites like Lulu®, anyone can be an author and create an income stream. Not only will they provide printing/shipping services, but they will assist you with marketing. They also allow buyers to download an electronic version of your book, if they prefer. You determine the price, and share part of your revenues with the site.

You may have the ideas, but not the confidence in your writing abilities. Task Partner can be your "ghost writer" or perhaps your editor or proofreader.

Maybe you don't have the skills to desktop publish your work in an appealing yet professional format. We can do that for you too.

If you're in the academic world, you may be familiar with publishing, but putting your highly technical treatise (complete with equations and illustrations) in press-ready format is too time-consuming. With our technical writing expertise, that's routine for us.

So, don't just dream about it - do it! And, if you need a hand along the way, start with a visit to http://www.taskpartner.ca/

P.S. If technical writing is in your blood, check out our book: "Technical Writing as a Freelance Business"

A NEW APPROACH TO ILLUSTRATION

2008-01-11T11:20:00.002-05:00

Both technical and marketing literature rely on illustration to drive a point home, whether it's instructing a technician how to replace a component in a machine or educating a potential customer on the merits of a product.

Consider the person shopping online for a product. Would they buy a piece of jewellery or a car sight-unseen? Whether or not we're conscious of it, images are what draw us to a product first. We are, after all, a society that craves instant gratification. Good illustrations are essential to attracting buyers and keeping those who use and maintain products properly informed.

So, in 2008, what options are available for illustrations? Let's start with technical illustration. Even within the last decade, we still relied to a large degree on artists to do "pen and ink" line illustrations from photographs or personal observation. Today, those same artists have either totally embraced the digital world or have retired from doing technical illustration altogether.

Why? If a client company designs its products using CAD software, the drawing elements already exist. An illustrator can import the "three D" CAD files, rotate them, "explode" them to show how the product is assembled, render (colour & shade) and otherwise embellish them to suit a specific purpose - at a lower cost and on a shorter timeline than for hand-drawn versions.

Thanks to Adobe® Acrobat's ubiquitous PDF (Portable Document Format) files, even non-artists can extract part or all of a CAD illustration exported in PDF for use in technical documents. This writer has personally zoomed in on larger exploded CAD drawings to create illustrations that highlight a particular part of an assembly, using Acrobat's crop tool. It's also possible to annotate a drawing to provide reference to a particular part mentioned in the text of the document, this time using Acrobat's callout tool. This approach creates huge savings.

If your company doesn't use CAD, however, don't even think about assigning illustration tasks to just any employee. You can't afford the loss of credence from amateur-looking literature. Subcontract to a CAD designer/artist or, alternately, a commercial photographer. Both have gone through a steep learning curve and job time to learn their craft - something an inexperienced employee cannot start to compete with. Task Partner can arrange either approach for you when you decide to proceed with your technical document.

Is your interest more in the marketing realm? Perhaps you're the company's webmaster or are responsible for producing e-zines and brochures. A technical illustrator can still come to the rescue by taking CAD files and creating colourful cutaways to show how your product works, or why it's built better. And, to embellish the piece, why not also consider stock photography? (Described in detail in another post in this blog - Vol. 2 July 2007.)

In the digital age, customers expect accurate, rapid delivery of information, and a professional look in the company's literature and web presentation. Make sure your illustrations support that good impression.

STOCK IMAGES – MAKE THEM WORK FOR YOU

2007-07-12T13:20:00.001-04:00

Back in the day, an art director would thumb through a glossy catalogue from a stock image provider and pick an image that might work in their client’s campaign. If they didn’t see exactly what they wanted, they could either hire a photographer or illustrator to make it, or get the aforementioned stock agencies to research other images in their library for a fee. The photographers in their respective stables were the elite, and pricing reflected that.

Enter the Internet age, and most of that has changed. While you will still see the big names and their exclusive arrangements with top-notch photographers, they have been joined online by many others. The consequence of this new competitive arena has, of course, created significant downward pressure on pricing. It has also created a vast increase in choices for buyers of licensed images.

Licensed Images

In most developed countries, when an artist creates an image, the copyright automatically belongs to them. In order for someone else to use that image on their web site or literature, permission must be obtained and a fee agreed upon. In return, the artist provides a license for that use.
Because the type and term of use varies widely, the fees for licensing can be wide-ranging. For example, if you were only printing 5,000 brochures, the license fee for a particular image would be much lower than if that same image was used on the cover of a best-selling romance novel.
The term “licensed” applies to both traditional and royalty-free arrangements (defined later). The difference is that with traditional licensing, the seller generally knows who the customer is and how they are going to use the image. In royalty-free licensing, this relationship doesn’t exist.

Traditional Licensing - Rights-Managed vs. Rights-Protected

Rights-managed images are licensed for a defined end use, and a license fee is determined by the terms of that use. They can be used in either an editorial or commercial context.
In an editorial context, that is, in a newspaper, magazine or television news piece, the artist is not required to gain permission from a person or property owner to use their face or their building (although there have been challenges to this concept). Editorial shots may be photojournalistic in nature (ie. current events) or simply scenes of people and places to support a story.
Commercial use means that the image will be used in advertising or brochures. Because they directly support the sale of a product or service, the fetching price is much higher than for editorial stock. If faces or other recognizable features of a person appear in the image, a model release must be provided by the artist. Why? The end user may be exposed to a lawsuit if they don’t. For commercial shoots, it is generally understood that the model will be paid if they are helping to promote something, even if it’s only for a dollar. In return, a photographer would receive a signed release, a copy of which would be provided to the end user. Similarly, if you want to use someone’s castle in your ad, you’d better make sure the photographer gets a property release.
This is not to say that rights-managed images used for commercial purposes are too scary or expensive for the small business owner to use. Depending on the size of your print run (or magazine circulation), how many countries it will be seen in, or how long an ad will run for, you may be able to score a model-released image for just a couple of hundred dollars.
But what if you find a unique image that you don’t want any other company using during your campaign period? Be prepared to pay 20 to 30% more (given the same run parameters) for the exclusivity. This is called a rights-protected image.

Royalty-Free Licensing

Royalty-free licensing has been the subject of much debate, and has typically been scorned by professional photographers. The end user pays a one-time license fee and has the right to use it however and for as long as they like. Remember, though - releases still apply for commercial use. Some royalty-free image sites have model releases for their entire collection, so they can be used for either commercial or editorial purposes without concern for liability issues.
The royalty-free concept has spawned a new kind of stock image portal referred to as microstock sites. Prices are down to $1 or less per image, a far cry from the $250 and up that traditional licensing typically costs. Quality and creative values can be all over the map, although this can also be said of some sites that sell both traditional and royalty-free. It’s interesting to note that those same big, established stock agencies with their exclusive libraries and high prices are actively buying up the microstock companies.
While buyers salivate over the choice of images they get for chump change, there is a dark side. Consider this - you cannot negotiate exclusivity for royalty-free. This may not matter to the Mom 'n Pop shop looking for something cheap and cheerful for their flyers, but should be a real concern for larger organizations. Stories abound about competitors using the same royalty-free image in their national advertising campaigns!

Summing Up
A caution about any online stock image collection. If, for instance, you search for “Jack Russell Terrier”, the volume of images you’ll have to sift through may be a staggering waste of your time. Narrow down your search by using quotes to indicate an exact phrase, or connect phrases and keywords with Boolean operators such as AND to ensure your results contain all of these attributes. Example "Jack Russell Terrier" AND playing AND water.

So where can you do your online stock image shopping? Here is a small sampling:

Photographer and Buyer Negotiate Directly
Photographers Direct– This UK site gets buyers and sellers together and allows them to negotiate directly anywhere in the world.

Traditional and Royalty-Free
Masterfile - Toronto based
Alamy - UK based. Largest online collection of images (over 15 million in Jan. '09)
Corbis
Getty Images

Microstock
IStockPhoto
Fotolia
Shutterstock
Dreamstime

© 2007-2009 Gordon Wood

How Do We Rate?

2007-07-06T15:17:00.001-04:00

How much to charge for work is always an uncomfortable subject for vendor and client alike.
Fortunately, there’s plenty of precedence on the Internet to help establish fair rates to charge for writing work. While rates are typically stated in dollar ranges, depending on the type of task, and to an extent, geographic region, both vendor and client can get a feel for whether a quotation is fair or not.
But there are different ways in which work can be quoted. By the word, by the hour, by the page or by the project come to mind. For this newsletter, though, we’ll look at the first two scenarios only.

By the word
This method is usually employed by freelance writers and editors of periodicals to negotiate (or dictate!) the price of an article. Now, articles may not be of much interest to Task Partner clients, but there may be cases where the client prefers to be charged by the word.
For instance, if copy is needed for a short brochure, and a rough estimate of the amount of text is known, the client can budget for it. The onus is on the writer to produce the copy to a ceiling price, regardless of how long it takes them to write it. Keep in mind that this price will be for a first draft only. Rewrites at the client’s request means further negotiation.
Where this method does not work (for the writer especially) is the creation of tag lines for a company’s branding program, or smart one-liners for advertising. The number of words can be 5 or less, so the client would pay only $5 to $10 for the tag! “Think time” needs to be covered, so hourly charging makes more sense in this example.

By the hour
In addition to extremely low word count assignments, such as the tag line example, charging by the hour is particularly suited to large projects. This could be a technical manual or copy for an entire web site. The client should have a reasonable idea of the scope of the project, so getting a budgetary estimate from a writer before commencing is recommended.
Break the project down into measurable milestones. That way, the writer can provide time and cost estimates for each. For instance, a web site can be broken down into pages. Keeping the project bite-sized means you can part company after a milestone is reached without a great deal of commitment (on both sides) if things don’t go as planned.
Clients with continuous writing needs may want to consider putting their favourite writer on retainer. In this scenario, the client guarantees that they will pay the writer for a specified number of hours per month, regardless of whether or not the writer provides any or all of those hours. The benefit to the client? They are guaranteed to get that writer’s services for up to the agreed number of hours. If the project goes beyond those hours in that month, the writer is also paid for the additional hours. This isn’t for everyone, but it works well where a busy client and a talented writer have a trusting relationship.

By the way, be prepared to be asked for a deposit before a writer starts a project. Given that the client and vendor may not have a prior relationship, it only makes sense that the vendor wants to be covered for their time if a payment history doesn’t exist. This may be 25% to 50% of the project cost, or it could simply be the first milestone payment.
OK - so we started talking about rates. Here’s a guide (only) as to what rate ranges you can expect to be quoted in southwestern Ontario and nationally. This is largely based on the Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC) website, but is also influenced by actual rates charged by local writers:

Remember - rates are negotiable, and some writers may quote rates outside of these ranges.
Finally, these hourly rates may seem high compared to what you pay your employees. Consider, however, that your employees were probably hired for their special skills, one of which may not be writing. If you add CPP, EI, WSIB and EHT contributions you make on their behalf, plus the cost of medical and dental insurance to their hourly rate, you’re better off subcontracting to a writer specialist.

Good luck with your negotiations and your writing projects!

BLOG LAUNCH!

2007-07-06T13:45:00.000-04:00

Welcome to Task Partner's new blog!

This is the place where all of our newsletters can be accessed. We hope they will inform and interest you. Our intent is to tell you as much as we can about the writing business and how we can help you fulfill your technical and business documentation needs.

Keep checking in here for updates, or visit our website at www.taskpartner.ca