From: Gary M.C. Bean
Subject:Kevin Cunningham 

Kevin Cunningham was the first person I hired when I took on managing documentation in addition to training.  When I interviewed him, he said that the documentation effort seemed to be in a disordered state in a number of ways.  I agreed.  

When he also observed that working under such conditions could be highly stressful, I had to agreed again.  (Before I took over Documentation, the turnover rate for both writers and managers was, if I remember correctly, somewhere under 1 year.)  

When I offered him the job, he said that he would take it if he could spend a significant part of his time working on systematizing the documentation process.  This was clearly the kind of innitiative and leadership I was looking for in my staff.  

Besides writing consistantly first-quality documentation, editing and reviewing other writers work, leading and participating in release software design and implementation, he has also been the ongoing champion and maintainer of the On-Line Help System, including presentations to staff and upper management, overseeing development effort for OLH browsing and viewing software, underlying document database, dbms utilities, and efficient document production process.   He has turned his frustration with a lack of an efficient, designed process for document production into the advocacy and supervision of a sustained, long-term effort (initially at a time of limited availability of resources) to conceive, design, develop and implement a coherent documentation system that includes documentation production software, format standards, and an integrated documentation delivery system, for both on-line and hardcopy documents.

That system was partially implemented last summer and a more complete version will be available this spring.  It will enhance our efforts significantly.

It is clear to me that, from the start, Kevin has been much more than a Senior Technical Writer, even a particularly competent and professional one.  His thinking has been stategic, rather than short-term.  He has taken on project supervisory responsibilities.  He has supervised a complex software development effort.  His efforts will bear fruit in all the work that documentation does.

In his qualifications, work, innitiative and leadership, in the responsibilities he has taken on and the effect he has had, he has clearly been actling at least as a Senior Technical Writer.  His promotion would simply be acknowledging what is already in fact the case.

Gary M.C. Bean
Training and Documentation Manager,
Project Athena, M.I.T.