Writers as key members of product development teams

All too often, technical writers have been relegated to the back end of the development process, providing documentation for products whose design and implementation are essentially complete. This paper describes a model that ensures writer involvement throughout the life cycle of a project. Although official policy at SunSoft supposedly mandates writer participation in all stages of product development, only engineering appreciation for the value writers add to the early stages guarantees success of the model. Therefore, this paper focuses on a very successful project and draws conclusions about the general applicability of the model