'Since deciding to enter the fresh food marketplace in
2004, IT company Anglia Business Solutions has invested more than £1 million
building its flagship LINKFresh® product into a market leading information
system designed especially for that sector. Using Microsoft’s Dynamics NAV
as the core ERP engine, our pace of development was very rapid, and five years
on LINKFresh now comprises 27 different modules. During this start-up
phase there was little resource available for product documentation. As
LINKFresh matured, however, we recognised that continued growth and success
internationally would require a larger UK team, plus the ability to forge
partnerships with Microsoft NAV resellers in other countries. To help turn
this vision into reality we decided to invest in product documentation, as a
cost effective way of capturing and sharing knowledge about how to configure and
deploy the LINKFresh product successfully.
At our offices in
Harston Mill, Cambridge we employ plenty of project managers, consultants and
developers. All of us know how to read and write, but we don’t have any
specialist technical authors on the team. Our limited experience of
putting documentation together in-house led us to believe that the process was
slow, resource intensive and frustrating. We decided to approach a
specialist for advice, and that’s when we were put in touch with Dr Andrew
Marlow.
Andrew listened carefully to our needs, and helped us to
define a pilot exercise that saw him author the first manual together with a
style guide applicable to all future manuals in the suite. I have to say
that we were very sceptical about the notion that someone from outside our
business could come in and put together high quality technical documentation
about a product they had never seen, for use in an industry they had no
experience of working in. At the very least we thought it would take large
amounts of time from our consulting team to train, advise, proof-read and so
forth. But Andrew said that we might be surprised at what a professional
technical author could achieve.
And we were: amazed would be a
better way of describing it. For the most part Andrew worked on his own,
preferring to immerse himself in the software and experiment to discover its
capabilities for himself. He needed little guidance from us and the
expected days and weeks of product training never materialised. Instead we
received high quality documentation that was 80% ready to go at the first
draft. Our time was used productively to get from 80% to 100%, making sure
that no features were missed and all technical information was correct.
Just two drafts later and we had achieved approved final copy, to a higher
standard and in far less time than any in-house exercise had achieved. The
pilot exercise taught us that out-sourcing our product documentation to a
professional is not only practical but cost-effective too.
We
continue to work with Andrew on LINKFresh documentation, and we now involve him
routinely at pre-release for any new LINKFresh modules. That way we get
the benefit of his suggestions on improving user interface and consistent use of
terminology before the software release is finalised, as well as documentation
to go with the release. I’d have no hesitation in recommending Andrew’s
services to any business with a similar need to ours.'
Mark Nixon, Operations Director
Anglia Business Solutions Ltd
