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The purpose of this document is to inform how Information Developers and product teams at Rackspace will collaborate and create beautiful documentation which will support customers building, learning, or trying Rackspace cloud products. The benifitis of a Service Level Agreement betweeen techncial writing and product develop teams are:

• Cross-functional perspectives: Teams learn about the work or each other. It provides an ongoing “cross-functional training” experience.
• Agreements: It documents actionable expectations, needs, and requests.
• Two-Way Approach: It establishes a mutual interdependent relationship.
• Action Plan: It provides rules of engagement that teams use to work together.
• Feedback: Suppliers received ongoing feedback about their success --- as opposed to after delivering a service to the internal customer.

This Service Level Agreement guides the relationship so that both teams work collaboratively for the benefit of bottom-line business results.

• User Guide: A guide to serve as the authorative source of information for Rackspace products
• Developer Guide: A guide to serve as the authoritive source of API operations and developing applciations on Rackspace products.
• Release Notes (Changelog): A record of what's changed in the last product release

Documentation is included in the sprint 0 planning. User stories for docs will be defined and included in the product management process. An Information Develoeprs will be assigned to support the product, treat them as a part of your team; invite them to all meetings, communication channels (slack, hipchat, irc), and include them in your sprint management tools (trello, jira). Information Developers are responsible for the end users learning journey, expect them to regularly interject feedback from the users perspective proactively and reactively.

Product managers will schedule a weekly doc sync with the Information Developer(s) supporting the product. The purpose of this meeting is to go over documentation impacting changes, review open doc tasks (JIRA, Trello), and help your writer resolve issues. In the begining of the relationship expect lots of questions and prepare to be hands on with training, over time it's expected that your write become a SME of your product.

Information Developers at Rackspace support a minimum of two teams, and often many teams. Besides your product team, your writer could be on another product team, or several. Also, all Information Developers are members of the DevDoc team, which has its own set of issues and tickets that arise. Your writer is a valuable resource. Be encouraging and including. Everything that you can do to help your writer learn the product and develop team rapport will help your product develop world class documentation.

It's helpful for Product Managers to setup up Wiki pages, as appropriate, so the entire team can make doc contributions that the writer can publish. Or, if folks want to contribute and publish docs themselves, be sure that your writer is notified of all doc work. This will help him or her stay on top of what is happening with the documentation, set realistic goals, and avoid duplication of effort.

Information Developers will require access to:

• any existing documentation on an accessible network.
• test systems for document testing and taking screen captures.
• the Subject Matter Experts and other individuals as necessary.
• Awareness of changes to project specifications.
• Access to meetings necessary for the success of the documentation.