Technical writing/Project management/Environment

What is meant by environment?

The literal meaning of environment is the surroundings in which a person finds himself and environment is an essential question which is to be addressed by the technical writer as it affects not what is written but also in what format it is presented.

Why is environment important?

Take for example an engineer installing a new telecoms server. Consider his work environment, warm, noisy and the fact that during the installation procedure he needs to be in front of a monitor as he does his work.

Therefore we ask ourselves two basic questions:

What does he need to know?
How can we best get that information to him within his environment?