Role: Technical Writer

Skills

Playing the Technical Writer requires experience and/or training in technical writing. The role may also require experience or training in developing help systems and/or Web sites.

Some background knowledge in the domain being documented is also desirable.

Good communication skills are important, since playing the Technical Writer is often required to interview developers, testers, and users in order to elicit correct and applicable documentation.

Assignment Approaches

The Technical Writer role can be assigned in the following ways:

Assign one or more staff members to perform both the Technical Writer and Course Developer roles. This is a commonly adopted approach and capitalizes on common skills that these roles share. Note that this assignment is based purely on the technical skills required for these roles and may result in lack of domain knowledge.
Assign one or more staff members to perform both the Technical Writer and System Analyst roles. This approach capitalizes on the domain knowledge that the System Analyst has gained during the Inception and Elaboration phases of the project, as well as the common communication skills that System Analysts share with this role.
Contract the role out to a specialized Technical Writers. This is a common approach taken to deal with these responsibilities.