The Art of Project Management

7.4. Who, when, and how

Much like vision documents, it's very important that specifications have one author. Everyone who is going to be doing the work should be contributing by making comments and adding content, but one person needs to filter it, shape it, and make it all fit together. The reason for this is simple: if you want the specification to read like it was written by a clear-thinking individual, you can't have different people owning different parts of the document. As long as that one author understands that it's his job to incorporate good contributions and suggestions from anyone who offers them, things should work out fine.

Assuming there is one primary author, the likely candidates for the job are the project manager, designer, or lead programmer. Because specs represent cross-functional decision making, they should be written by whomever is most accountable for decisions at that level. The feature specification and the technical specification are obligated to match and reconnect with the work-item lists the programming team compiled. If engineering and design have been working together throughout the design process, making these things match up is straightforward. As a bonus, working together early on changes the perspective on the spec process: it will be seen as a happy collaboration to plan work, rather than the beginning of a process of debate and frustration.

For this and other reasons, the specification work should begin during the design phase. As prototypes ...