Category: Work

We all have a need to make sure we are working on the most important thing, the thing that needs our attention and focus the most. Given that all of us will have more than one thing that needs to get done, you need to prioritise.

But how?

Ivan Walsh recently posted his thoughts on this topic but he doesn’t cover the process that comes before the daily decision making of “what shall I do today?”.

Presuming that you don’t lurch from day to day and that you have a plan, or at least a list of things that you need to deliver, how do you go about setting the priority?

Some people will be lucky to have a direct customer who knows exactly what they want, you can work with them around any constraints of time and budget (resource) to prioritise the work that needs done.

But what if you have two customers, or three, or seven?

Well that’s close to the situation I’m in and my solution is quite simple.

Let them decide.

A few months back I started to jot down, in a spreadsheet, everything that my team COULD do. It includes some items like scouring our Wiki for any useful information that we can use, as well as “hey you know what would be really great..” requests we get which aren’t urgent but which I didn’t want to lose.

I soon realised I might as well track every information request there and very soon after that I realised that I needed a way to sort the list and make sure we were working on the right thing, at the right time.

Given that many items on that list were ‘put’ there by other people, I realised that if we estimated (very roughly) how much effort each would take, we would be able to bargain with people and, ultimately if two requests are in conflict then, hey, I can get the people who requested them to discuss the reasons and let them decide.

So we now have a big list of work items, each estimated, each prioritised (we are using MoSCoW) and which I can use to drive discussions when the next “must have, immediately” request lands in my inbox.

Ultimately, our customers decide what we work on and as I can give them a full picture of what, and why, it’s much easier for them to understand those times when they don’t get what they want. Having that information to hand makes the act of getting real priorities much easier.

My response, via Twitter, to Ivan’s post was this: “I tend to let other people set the priorities for my work. That way they all have (to have) a view of it.”

How do you set your priorities?

Over the coming month or so, I’ll be casting around for opinion and insight from you, my lovely readers, particularly if you are based in the UK and especially if you are a member of the ISTC member.

Why? I hear you ask.

It’s because I’m planning, designing, and building, a community focussed extension to the website (or sub-website, or side-website or.. well that bit has still to be agreed). I’m still figuring out how best to collate the information and requirements for such a website, and where would be best to hold those collaborative conversations that will be required throughout the build and test phase of the website. I’ll announce things here as well as the ISTC mailing list (unless it’s something of particular sensitivity, but as I can’t even dream one up at the moment I doubt that’ll be an issue).

Exciting times ahead then, challenging some would say, and I have to admit I’m really looking forward to getting some momentum going. I’ve plenty of ideas but it’s not about what I want, it’s making sure the new website meets the needs of people who will be using it. With that in mind I’m currently planning on how, and who, is best to get involved.

But before I can ask anyone to get involved, I think it’s a good idea to have a clear vision for what it is we are trying to achieve and that’s what I’ve been working on this week and you can expect an update at the weekend.

Theme: The remit of communication professionals in the organisation. How can different comms professionals (technical authors, editors, web content/marketing/training writers, internal/corporate comms, information architects, graphic designers…) work effectively with each other and the rest of the organisation?

Time: Monday 25 January 2010, from 7.30 pm onwards.

Venue: Waxy O’Connors pub, 44 West George Street, Glasgow, G2 1DH. Please make your way to McTurk’s Room on the middle level.

The event is free and you don’t need to be an ISTC member to attend. Get in touch with Katja McLaughlin for more details.

I was recently asked to write an article about blogging for inclusion in a piece focussed on social media and how it will both challenge and change our profession as a whole and the more I wrote the more it helped me sort out my own thoughts on the matter.

One thing I’ve realised is that even if you don’t think social media will impact your own professional circumstances, I have no doubts that it will change the way our profession is perceived.

I’ve also come to realise that I’ve done a fair bit of talking about a lot of this stuff, yet continue to be stalled on actually doing it. So, with a new year stretching ahead of me I guess it’s time to put up or shut up.

As I have control of our developer community website the most obvious place to start is with a blog. Using the blog to publish short articles, and allowing people to comment on them seems to be a straightforward approach and with some encouragement I know some of the developers will contribute short articles as well.

The challenge will come in how we seed the community. At present it’s telling that with a little bit of PR, the number of people visiting the community website rises, so for now I’ll continue with the old school methods to drive traffic to the website (mainly through ‘update’ emails). Hopefully, if we provide enough interaction opportunities on the website, that need will drop away and the community well start to sustain itself.

Social media is a strange beast at times. There is always a lot of noise at first and, when it dies away it can seem like there isn’t much substance left. However, the people who are succeeding at using social media services, the people at the cutting edge of such things, the people who adopt new ideas and technology and are ready and willing to try them out to see if they work, are finding that there is a much richer set of capabilities than may be obvious, and the real value in your use of social media isn’t the technology but the people who use it, the community.

Your circumstances may mean that, for reasons outwith your control, social media just cannot be considered. However for everyone else, surely it’s time you took a step back and thought about the information you produce, the community of people who use it, and how best to meet their needs.

Maybe it’s time to make some brave choices.

And if you’ve come this far it’s about now that the reality of social media hits home.

You see for all the strengths and possibilities that the myriad of social media services offer, the one thing that no-one else can tell you is what choice to make. The direction you take depends on too many variables that only you know but, at this point, there is only one thing worse than making the wrong decision.

Not making a decision at all.

The information platform is changing, it is evolving and will continually evolve over the coming few years. You can’t afford to wait until the evolution is finished, you need to jump aboard now. You’ll need to learn fast, figure things out as you go, plan as best you can, and concede defeat at times but if you don’t then you’ll be left where you are now.

Except it’ll be 3 years further down the line and the rest of the world will have moved on.

Let me tell you a story. In it our hero (me) fights valiantly against two Javascript dragons called Webhelp and Google Analytics. It’s a bloody battle and at the end, when all the fighting is done, well … you’ll have to read on and find out.

Some background first.

We have a developer community website which hosts downloads of our software and all the documentation in PDF format. To make it easier for people to find information in the product documentation, we also host a Webhelp version of each and every document in one master Webhelp system so you can search across the entire thing. It works really well.

To track how the other areas of the website are used, we have a Google Analytics account and the necessary code has been added. For the Webhelp, the code is in both the index.htm and topic.htm files.

But, and this is where the story begins, it doesn’t work properly.

Google Analytics will happily track every visit to the WebHelp system, but it stops there. Any click made within the system is recorded as a click but there is no detail on WHAT topic was viewed. We had hoped to get stats on this to allow us to better focus on the areas of the product people were enquiring about but we are, essentially, blind.

It’s very annoying.

Why is this so? Well I think it’s to do with the way WebHelp is created. It uses a Javascript library called Ext JS which, amongst other things, means that every time you open a topic in the Webhelp, it’s loaded through a Javascript call so Google Analytics never ‘sees’ a new HTML page (a new topic) being loaded so doesn’t know what you are viewing.

I think. I’m not 100% sure to be honest.

I’ve logged a somewhat vague Support call with Author-it, and have enlisted the help of our own webmaster. Next step will be to beg and plead with some of the developers for some of their brain power (most of them have a fair bit to spare).

It’s hugely annoying, being so close to what we want but not able to fix it myself, but sometimes you just have to admit defeat.

Of the battle, that is. I WILL win the war!

Seriously, do we spend too much time worrying about this? What do we get paid for after all, to write documentation, so that’s what we should concentrate on doing. So what if no-one reads it, as long as I’ve done my job I’ll get paid.

And no, I don’t care if they don’t understand how to use the product properly, if they choose not to read the documentation then there isn’t much more I can do, is there? Yeah, they might get stuck but if I can learn it, so can they. If not then maybe they shouldn’t

Pander, pander, pander. I’m sick of it. The documentation is perfectly good and until people learn to read it then they really should stop complaining. Ohh and if they choose to look on the internet for an answer to their question, good luck! We all know that those bloggering things are a lot of rubbish and no, I don’t use that Twatting thing either, what a waste of time. Don’t even start me on Facebooks.

I’m perfectly busy enough, doing the job I was paid for, so yes, they should RTFM and it’s not my fault if they don’t.

…

Obviously I’m jesting, but this seems to be a bit of a hot topic right now, and rather than rehash what has already been said, I’d highly recommend you spend 10 minutes of your day reading the following:

• If no-one reads the manual, then why bother?
• If No One Reads the Manual, That’s Okay
• If no one reads the manual, that’s NOT okay
• Getting users to read the documentation

I guess it’s safe to say there are challenges ahead but hey, it’s a new year, what better time to start tackling them.