Documentation certification?

strauchr

I been thinking alot about this lately mainly because I have been put on a design contract right now which requires a lot of documentation.

What if we had a certification, or even just a framework for industry standard documentation. Such as how the document should be laid out, file names, document control etc. Every workplace has their own way of doing this but it is hard for someone like me to come in and try and make sense of alot of what they have done.

It would be great for an industry standard here I think. Especially for some of those project spreadsheets which are hard to make sense of. I am sure there are some templates and frameworks out there but a certification just to prove you know an industry standard and abide by it would be great.

Obviously it would have to be flexible but within guidelines etc.

woodworm

Good idea, but it would be very difficult to implement somewhere that wasn't a greenfield site.

Saying that, doesn't some project management certs, such as Prince2 cover some of those concepts (plus a lot more!).

filkenjitsu

unfortunetly you could never standardize spreadsheets. I worked with excel hardcore for a year and a half.

There would be no template to follow when the amount of products and different projects constantly change and need customized sheets to make sense of the massive amout of items you are working with.

johnnynodough

meh, let the technical writers sort it out .

JDMurray

johnnynodough wrote:

meh, let the technical writers sort it out .

Better a job for technical editors. The writers are just content providers; it's the editors that enforce the styles and standards.