Changing The "F" in RTFM to "Fantastic"

Talk about unsung -- tech writers just don't get the credit they deserve.  They sit between R&D, customers, and support trying to capture the capabilities and intent of the software and present it accurately and succintly.  They record the "tribal knowledge" of the team so that new and existing users can function at their best, but then they hear that no one has read the f****** manual.

Well one of our tech writers sought to change that and to do so not just for Cadence, but to influence her fellow writers across the industry.  Faced with tens of thousands of pages of documentation organized by the whims of marketing, her team was burdened with a huge management task complete with redundantant information and huge monolithinc manuals. Claudia Landell led a team inside Cadence verification R&D to find better ways to organize the information, to create consistancy across multiple teams, and to ulitmately make the Cadence verification documentation easier to maintain, read, navigate, and search. She tested those ideas with you, our customers, to validate the improvements the team was making.

For sure this was a team effort, but Claudia led the way. You can read more about this work (since this is, after all, a blog on documentation :-) ) in Claudia's article published in the Center for Information-Development Management's January newsletter. While documentation improvements are a work in progress, our customers are enjoying the fruits of this labor today with our current Incisive Enterprise Solutions.

One of the big tasks for the genIES is to find opportunities to improve usability and enhance your productivity wherever we can.  Claudia and the whole Incisive tech writing team have started by changing the "F" in RTFM to "fantastic". If you have usability and productivity suggestions, make those via Cadence support or by emailing your genIES@cadence.com team.

=Team genIES