Every profession has the same discipline:

To consistently identify, specify, design and deliver the right product at the right price.

Featured: Consistency, Identify, Specify, Design

1. Consistency

How often do you turn into the wrong drive-way when you go home?  How often do you forget your income tax?

We don't make these mistakes often because we have some kind of procedure to make sure we do the right things at the right time.  read more.

2. Identify

What is today's biggest question?  Are you who you say you are?  We all want accurate identification.  In Technical Writing accurate identification is about How, Who, What, When, Where, Why.

To deliver the right product at the right price, we have to ask a lot of questions.  read more

3. Specify

What is "quality"?  For most people there are as many answers as there are people to ask.  The practical answer is: the item satisfies my needs.  read more

4. Design

If this is a "standard" documentation task – meaning you have a template (because the design of the document is the same as last time), you're done.

Almost.  read more

 

Featured: Deliver, Right Product, Right Price

5. Deliver

We lie!  It is produce and deliver.  read more

6. The Right Product

The Right (documentation) Product comes out of the Identify, Specify and Design procedures.  read more

7. The Right Price

The Right Price comes out of the Identify and Specify procedures. And sometimes out of the Design procedure if the Design leads to Identify and Specify revisions.  read more

8. Professional Development: not for everyone?

The very young, the very old and other similar categories probably don't need to think about professional development.  But everyone else should.

Why?  read more

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Last Updated: 14 November 2013 14 November 2013
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The discipline of a profession (overview)

The discipline is the same for every profession:  To consistently identify, specify, design and deliver the right product for the right price.  What is different for every profession are the tools and techniques applied to each of those steps and how long it takes to acquire the starting point knowledge.  For example, a doctor has to study longer than an accountant and the range of tools a doctor uses is much larger than an accountant.  But for this overview, we will look only at the way the discipline of the profession applies to accountants, lawyers, doctors and technical communicators.

Consider the following table which summarises the activities for each step at the simplest level. (A document is any type of information product such as a printed document, a presentation, a film clip, a web page, a brochure, a manual and so on.)

Table 1 - Compares the discipline of several professions
Component Accountant Lawyer Doctor Technical
Communicator
Identify: An accounting
approach.		 A defence. The disease. The real customer
and real purpose
of the document.
Specify: The desired
outcomes,
interim stages,
legal and
other pract
-ice require-
ments.		 Defence
strategy.		 Treatment
(could be
any combin-
ation of
drugs, physio-
therapy, rad-
iation and so on).		 Content of the
document.
Design: Accounting
changes,
posting
sequences,
reports.		 Scope and
structure
of questions
and argu-
ments.		 Write referrals
and scripts.		 Storyboard the
content.
Deliver: Implement
the accounting
changes and
postings.		 Defend case
in court.		 Administer
treatments -
drugs, physio,
radiation
and so on.		 Write the
document.
Right
product		 Solves
the account-
ing problem.		 Client-
specific
defence.		 Disease-
specific
treatment.		 Fit for Purpose
document, chart
presentation
movie and
so on.
Right
price		 Client can
afford it.		 Client can
afford it.		 Patient can
afford it.		 Fits the 
budget.

 

Separate articles will give more detail about how each step applies to Technical Communicators.

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