We are often asked where our company got its name. We have noticed that many of our clients become overwhelmed trying to get their documentation completed on time and on budget. When they call us in to help, they go from being overwhelmed to being underwhelmed. Further, our team has remained on the leading edge of our industry for so long that no project or deadline overwhelms us. We are able to act, rather than react. Here are some of the areas in which we can offer you our assistance.

If your company needs additional resources to meet your current project requirements, there are a variety of ways we can help. We can provide you with an on-call documentation department staffed with professionally trained specialists. We are prepared to handle every phase of your project—from initial planning to scheduling and design to information-gathering, authoring, revisions, indexing, and delivery of final printed materials if desired.

When you present us with a need, we assign the most appropriate staff specialist for your specific project to meet with you, to further determine the scope of the project, and to create a project plan. The project leader then assembles and manages a team of one or many to work onsite, offsite, short-term, or long-term, as your company’s needs dictate. For the duration of the project, this individual is your single point of contact, thus enhancing efficiency, clarity, and service.

Underwhelmed can complete a short-term high-intensity project with our offsite team, help you assemble an onsite team for such a project, or simply provide individual onsite or offsite services to support and enhance your existing staff’s capabilities. The benefit of working with Underwhelmed is that no matter what you need—whether it’s our complete suite of documentation services or simply a bit of additional support—we can help. We tailor our services to your requirements.

In addition to our on-call technical documentation services, we can also ease the process of locating and hiring qualified staff and contract personnel. Underwhelmed offers you richly trained, professional, experienced technical-publications specialists.

Underwhelmed is not like any other agency you may have encountered in the past; we are first and foremost a consulting firm of the highest caliber technical writers, editors, help and Web authors, graphic artists, information architects, project managers, and multimedia developers. We are constantly being approached by specialists who are interested in working with us, and we have an extensive and continually growing database of resumes. In addition to our database, we also use techniques from the recruiting industry to attract candidates for contract and staff positions.

We can do a more effective job than more generalized technical-staffing firms because our hands-on knowledge of technical-documentation strategies, techniques, and processes gives us a higher level of understanding of what sort of candidate is right for your needs. Underwhelmed qualifies each candidate by reviewing their resume and writing samples, meeting with them to verify that they exceed industry standards, and contacting their previous employers. In addition, most of our technical-publications specialists have proven themselves on other Underwhelmed projects before they begin work on your project.

If your needs aren’t specific to particular projects but are, instead, more process-oriented, we offer a number of consulting services that you may find helpful. For instance, we can support you in forming a new documentation department within your company by analyzing your needs and making staffing and implementation recommendations. We offer support for new or existing documentation groups, including helping you to develop and establish consistent editorial and graphical style guidelines for your print and online documentation, and creating in-house style guides for your newly hired staff. We can also train your team members in the use of any or all of the commonly used print and online publishing tools such as Adobe FrameMakerâ , Adobe AcrobatÔ , RoboHELPâ , Macromedia DirectorÔ , and Microsoft FrontPageÔ .

There are other ways that we can help you to maximize the efficiency and productivity of your existing staff and information-development processes. We can help you restructure your existing document design or devise an entirely new information strategy for informational resources of any size, whether they be individual printed guides, help systems, in-house training courses and CBTs (computer-based training modules), or complete integrated documentation sets published using multiple media. If you need assistance with your corporate or divisional intranet, we can provide individual specialists to perform any task, including information architecture, interface design, authoring-and-maintenance process planning, and tools/methodology standards establishment. We can help you develop or redesign Web sites by providing services and support in the areas of content development, graphical and navigational design, and site maintenance.