Documentation Plan: [Product or release name]

Plan for the user and developer documentation of a product or release: audiences and their tasks, deliverables, structure, style, tooling, review, localisation, accessibility, maintenance and success measures. Based on common industry practice for documentation planning. Replace every [bracketed] value and every row marked Example.

1. Purpose and scope

This plan covers the documentation needed for [Product name] [4.0]: end-user help, administrator and installation guides, API documentation and release notes. It does not cover [marketing pages, sales enablement material, internal design documents], which are owned by [teams].

Goals for this release:

• Example: Every new feature has task documentation on release day.
• Example: Reduce "how do I" support tickets for the import feature by 30%.
• Example: Publish the API reference generated from the OpenAPI file.

2. Audiences and their tasks

3. Deliverables inventory

Effort estimate: [about 45 writer-days], based on roughly 1.5 days per new task article and 0.5 days per updated article.

4. Information architecture

The help centre is organised by audience, then by content type:

Rules: each page has one type; every how-to links to the reference it uses; every error message in the product links to a troubleshooting entry.

5. Style and terminology

• Style guide: [Technical Writing Style Guide, version 2.1].
• Terminology source: [product glossary link]; the UI wins when terms conflict.

6. Tools and publishing pipeline

7. Review and approval workflow

Content is published only when steps 1 to 3 are complete; step 4 is required for release notes and new tutorials.

8. Localisation

Preparation rules: freeze English source before hand-off; no text in images; keep UI terms in a translation memory; allow about 30% text expansion in layouts.

9. Accessibility

All published documentation targets [WCAG 2.2 level AA]. Checks per pull request: heading order, alt text on every image, descriptive link text, tables with header rows, code blocks with a language label, and colour contrast in diagrams. Videos need captions and a transcript.

10. Maintenance and versioning

• Docs are versioned with the product; the latest two major versions stay online, older ones are archived with a banner.
• Each page has an owner in its front matter and is reviewed at least every [12 months] or when its feature changes.
• Feedback from the "Was this helpful?" widget and support tickets is triaged weekly by [@docs-lead].

11. Metrics

Helpful rating is computed as $\frac{\text{yes votes}}{\text{yes votes} + \text{no votes}}$ over articles with at least 30 votes.

12. Risks and dependencies

Standard and licence note

Based on common industry practice for documentation planning in software product teams. Template licence: MIT.