User talk:Guillom/Roles and responsibilities

Previous page history was archived for backup purposes at User talk:Guillom/Roles and responsibilities/LQT Archive 1 on 2015-07-10.

I can appreciate the desire for clarity, but expect that mapping this out explicitly could solve one problem but cause another. Telling people "this is exactly what you are expected to do" which is clarifying is strikingly similar to telling them "this is the only stuff you are allowed to do", which is problematic.

We have a large number of people on staff who have experience working professionally as, and often contribute as, a variety of roles. Most commonly we have developers who are also designers and designers who are also researchers.

So, how could we map out responsibilities without restricting people's contributions in diverse areas of projects and picking up slack when others fall behind?

This post was posted by Trevor Parscal (WMF), but signed as Trevor Parscal.

The goal is clearly not to restrict or to prevent people from doing stuff that isn't listed in their responsibilities. The goal is to have accountability and make sure everything gets done. In the end, it doesn't matter if you end up doing someone else's work (as long as they know it and agree with it), as long as someone is responsible for getting that work done.

I still haven't completely figured out how UX/IxD design works with an Agile development methodology. I've got some documentation to read on that, but thoughts are appreciated.

A few selected links:

• http://agileproductdesign.com/blog/emerging_best_agile_ux_practice.html
• http://www.thinkingandmaking.com/view/agile-ux-six

Do you have thoughts on how technical editors and writers fit into the picture?

For my part, I'm finding these things:

• a significant portion of the documentation is out-of-date
• that which is up-to-date is often incomplete or simply incorrect
• technical editors/writers need significant technical knowledge and research skills to be effective - even with these skills, they will also need support from the core devs on particularly challenging or unfamiliar topics

Documentation should be an explicit responsibility of everyone involved in the development process; i.e. the strategic product department should document the process that led to their decisions, same for the product manager, same for the designer, etc.

I'd argue it's the responsibility of each developer to create the appropriate documentation of the code they produce. As a consequence, I'd imagine the role of technical writers would be to gently nag everyone who falls behind on this task, that many dislike. In my view, technical writers shouldn't be the ones producing the documentation; they should be the ones making sure it stays up-to-date and complete.

How does that sound?