Hmm. Sounds like impeccable logic to me: getting from premisses to conclusion. We might not like the premisses, but we can't deny that the conclusions are their logical consequence.
One way that I have been able to influence this thinking is precisely the connection between good documentation and customer support costs. Admittedly this was a long time ago; now, if the support costs don't fall into the same accounting period as the documentation costs, short-termism says "ignore the consequences".
A bit like continuing to dig for coal and drill for oil, really . . . - Michael Lewis On 2014/12/18 09:46, Christine Kent wrote:
We are assuming that the world runs by logic. It does not. The only item that matters is the immediate bottom line, and no amount of good research and good argument is going to matter a d**n if it does not affect the immediate bottom line.The product does not have to be “fit for purpose” as long as more gross profit can be made from the shonky version than from a good version of whatever the product is. The maths are done between quality and c**p, and c**p wins out every time.Corporations run the same way. The bosses are all on KPIs, and those KPIs are almost always statistically based on invalid measurements of success. I have never seen a KPI that placed a statistical value on quality technical writing (except for the technical writer of course). KPIs are placed on bringing projects in on budget and on time, and the component that is the easiest to drop without management realising it has been dropped is the user support component. These days it is almost always an afterthought and is rarely costed in the ongoing costs of running business. The person being measured has long abdicated to the next even higher paying job long before it becomes apparent that whatever project they were running has failed implementation and is now requiring massive, costly and mostly fruitless patches.The debate here is not about how to convince bosses to use logic and thus ensure good documentation, but how to get organisations to change their ways of measuring success.Good luck with that one. Cheers, Christine
