In our ongoing department reorganization, we technical writers are experiencing some angst as we carve out a desirable place for ourselves. However, as we’ve talked about it as a community of practice (no longer as an organized team with our own manager), I think we’re coming to an agreement that now is the time to make things happen—to strike, as Tom likes to say.

After the initial, high-level reorganization, Tom and I are in the same division, so we’ve discussed a plan for taking a more prominent place in project managers’ and interaction designers’ consciousness. This is the key for us because the PMs are the ones to include us in their project plans and budgets, and we would be working with designers to decide on user education approaches and contribute to the design itself.

Finding Tech Comm’s Place in the Family

After Tom’s blog post about our meeting with an interaction design manager, I asked him about his point of view and his readers’ reactions to the post. We discussed getting involved in projects early and contributing to user interface text. We talked more about this in our community meeting this week. Again, we’re looking to make sure that the people who make the decisions give us a rightful place at the table.

We also talked about many designers’ “holy grail” of creating products so intuitive that no documentation is needed. Tom reminded me and then the group of an important point I had forgotten. An interaction designer once said something like this to me, and I had passed it on to the team: “Saying that ‘if the interaction designer does his job right, the product doesn’t need help’ is like saying ‘if the developer does his job right, the product doesn’t need QA.’”

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Having recently been included in release readiness meetings, I’ve had a few more items on my weekly calendar. Before that was the communication vs. programming problem we worked through.

One of the project managers I work with came to my desk a couple of weeks ago and told me that he had just come out of a two-hour meeting that I probably should have been in. Apparently one of the primary users of one application can mostly navigate the complex set of business rules that the system supports and do what he needs to do, but he’s missing some of the nuances. So the manager said that the leadership team discussed possibly making some changes in the next few months, but they’d need me to take these business rules and boil them down to simple a cause-and-effect document. “I’ll make sure to include you in future conversations about this,” he said.

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I’ve been asked what the biggest surprise was for me when I went full-time into the field of technical communication following university graduation. Honestly, not a lot surprised me; I knew how to write procedures, gather information, and use Web, print, and graphics tools. I had even worked in a company environment during a short contract period following my freshman year of college.

So what was the surprise?

Basically that on a significantly sized software development team, no one really knew how to work with a technical writer. So it was up to me to educate them. Problem was, I didn’t know how they were supposed to incorporate me into their team either.

When I worked in that contract position I mentioned, it was on a team of writers and editors. Because we were dealing with content for a website, we interacted with a couple of database administrators, but that was about it. Most of our interactions were with each other and our team lead’s manager.

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Still somewhat surprised that Vanessa, the project manager, had labeled him a major player in solving the customer’s problems, Henry projected his improved diagram onto the screen. Everyone looked at Vanessa.

“Henry, will you explain the diagram, and then we can go through each situation and find out whether the right things are happening.”

Henry hadn’t expected to guide the discussion, but he talked through the diagram. Then he began going through each relationship and explaining the effects of the relationship on the reports that the users were generating using the software.

As they went, the customer identified where things were happening correctly and where something needed to change. Vanessa kept track of action items, and since they uncovered a couple of inaccuracies, Henry took note of where he needed to make changes. Vanessa then asked Henry to create a version of the diagram that represented what should be happening in the software as if it already was. The development team could take that version and begin creating and assigning tasks.

When the meeting was over, Henry couldn’t help but experience some relief. The spotlight had been moved elsewhere. His original documentation on the software had contained a couple of errors, and he would fix them, of course. It was possible that the number of questions and problems coming back to the customer stemmed from those errors. But this possible communication problem had exposed a programming problem. And Henry, being the professional communicator on the team, had taken the task of communicating to the customer how the software currently worked, and doing it clearly enough that the customer could make informed decisions. So communication had been the first step to solving the programming problem.

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Once again, Henry met with the project leadership; only this time, he was the star of the show. In the last meeting, he had taken the assignment to diagram the relationships that were currently possible to set between two types of objects in the software, as well as the downstream effects of those settings. He had to represent four criteria in a two-dimensional diagram but had a hard time thinking in four dimensions at first.

After some thought and experimenting, he accounted for all four types of variables by combining two of the criteria into one axis, putting the third across the other axis, and explaining the effects at the intersection of row and column. It didn’t look amazing, but it would do the job.

A little timid, Henry projected his laptop screen onto the conference room wall. He glanced around and saw a couple of confused looks.

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Henry opened up a PDF on his laptop and went to page 27. The meeting continued around him as he scanned the text of the procedure he’d written 18 months before so he could verify some of the information that had been distributed.

“One way to look at this is that we want to prevent our customer from getting these phone calls all the time—or at all,” said Vanessa, the project manager. “What’s the first step?”

George, the business analyst, lifted a hand. “Well, since he keeps getting asked why people are or aren’t seeing this or that in the reports, I think it’s a data problem. We need to start there.”

“Or it’s a training problem,” said Melanie, the lead of the quality assurance team. She looked at Henry. “If there’s a data problem, maybe the users don’t understand how to set the data up correctly.”

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Sometimes, the Agile software development methodology seems like it could be renamed the “Fly by the Seat of Your Pants” methodology. But really, it means that you need a somewhat different set of project management skills for your documentation. I could certainly improve in these skills, but here are a few I rely on in an Agile environment.

Skill 1: Topic-Based Writing

Before I describe this one, I need to point out that yes, writing isn’t exactly planning; writing is what a technical writer does after planning. Writing is a rubber-meets-the-road activity.

True, but the project management applies in the way that you plan to write. I heard it said once that DITA is perfect for Agile environments because the way writers chunk information in that scheme allows that information to be dispensed from a single source into whatever output happens to be needed at a particular time. In short, it allows writers to quickly respond.

If I could substitute “topic-based writing” for “DITA” here, I would add that another great benefit is that writing in small topics allows you to keep pace with development and to release documentation in step with the application updates. Small topics give you less work to do in the iterations or sprints and enable you to mark your progress more regularly. So plan to write small in general and then adapt as needed.

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