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"The Technical Writing Pros"

Allard is a technical writing services company, providing turn-key technical manuals for our clients. We specialize in technical writing, with an emphasis on “technical”. Our writers have an engineering or technical background. We are not journalism or liberal arts majors. Our writers are comfortable working directly with technicians, engineers, and project managers.

How We Work

Almost all of our projects are performed on a “firm, fixed-price” basis. This approach is beneficial for our clients, as they can accurately budget for their technical manuals and avoid cost overruns. It also provides Allard with an incentive to complete the project on or ahead of schedule whenever possible.

To get started, we typically create a rough outline for the project and, with input from the client, establish an estimated page count. Once the client is satisified with the estimated page count, Allard’s management calculates the labor required from the technical writers, editors, and illustrators to create the manual. The labor requirement is combined with any necessary travel, software, printing, and shipping costs required and determine a price.

Our goal is to develop a long-term relationship with our clients, providing consistently high quality technical manuals. Many of our customers have outsourced all their technical writing jobs to Allard for many years.

Why Outsource Manuals?

Our clients realize a number of benefits by outsourcing their technical manuals to Allard. In most cases, technical writing workloads are not consistent; there's a lot of work to be done with a new product roll-out or revision, but not much otherwise. Many companies can't justify the cost of a full-time technical writer given this varying workload.

So, many companies delegate their technical manuals to one of the engineers or managers. Shouldn't these individuals be concentrating on their actual job function? How much are you paying that engineer to do technical writing? Doesn't it make more sense to have a professional technical writer creating a quality document?

And if you're using a contract tech writer on an hourly basis, take a minute to think about that. What incentive does a contractor have to finish the job early, or even on schedule?

At Allard our technical writers are full-time, long time members of the team. If you come back in two years for a revision or update to your manual, chances are good that the original writer will be available for the new work. What do you think are the odds that a contractor will be available for updates in a year or two?

Michael D. Bean's Blog

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