A model for effective technical documents within an engineering organization

The author presents a model for efficiently generating, reviewing, approving, distributing, and revising high-quality technical documents within an engineering organization. An autonomous publications section centralizes all processes that support production of the project´s technical documents. This support model has several benefits: (1) it allows engineers to concentrate primarily on the technical content of a document, not its format or organization; (2) an autonomous publications section is responsible for ensuring adherence to project-wide standards and requirements for technical documents; and (3) the separate publications section has all the resources (technical writing and editing, word processing, graphics, document-control personnel) needed to support end-to-end creation and distribution of a document. Limitations and variations of the model are examined.<>