Category: Work

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. As such, it stands to reason that two monkeys would be able to produce the same volume of output, but are unlikely to write exactly the same thing. Add in a few more monkeys to the equation and suddenly you have lots of content, none of which really relates to anything else.

I’ll stop with the monkey metaphor before I insult anyone.

Consistency is an important part of communication, even at the simplest level of having a common terminology, using the same words consistently throughout a document helps the reader learn. Take this idea up a level, from a single document to a number of documents and maintaining the same terminology across all documents can further help re-enforce the messaging and aid learning, and should give the reader a level of comfort that the entire set of information has been thought of, and delivered, as a cohesive set.

Move up the stack one more time and you start to look around at surrounding areas of information, outside of product documentation, produced by a different department and it’s here that consistency starts to suffer.

Typically Technical Communications teams will spend some time developing their own Style Guide (however loose), and agree a basic set of terminology, also known as the Product Glossary. Having been involved with creating a Product Glossary in the past, it’s interesting that other areas of the company see it as being a ‘documentation thing’, until such times as you get them to sit down and help you compose entries for it.

I know that the information produced by my team will be consistent and is written in a similar enough style that it won’t ‘jar’ the reader. In other words, it doesn’t matter who wrote the information, it is all part of one larger set of documentation, with a similar tone, voice and style.

Aiming the information at the correct audience is a key part of deciding what the three attributes of tone, voice and style, should be, and it’s at this point that I find other departments starting to struggle. Without a clear idea of the audience, and with their own perception of what the message (the terminology) needs to be, there is a tendency to wander off message, and produce a document which, whilst perfectly good in isolation, doesn’t seem to fit into the overall set of product information.

So what type of information is this? Well it varies, and can be tracked through the customer (or company) journey and their interactions with your company and product. Broadly speaking there are four levels, all of which need to be talking to the correct audience, and ideally should be providing the same message in a consistent manner.

1. First up there is an introduction, a high level chat about our product and what it can do. This is typically a mix of marketing brochures, website collateral, and sales presentations.
2. The next level of interaction delves a little deeper into the business benefits and key selling points of the product, and can start to touch on product features and capabilities.
3. After that, there is a need to provide a level of technical information, outlining the architecture and fundamental design of your product, detail the full set of capabilities, and provide reassurance around any potential implementation issues that may arise.
4. And then we get to product documentation, training material, and ongoing support and maintenance information.

Four levels of information, all of which should be saying the same thing about the product, regardless of what message that is.

It would be wrong to say that each level is unique, as each interaction your company has with a customer will vary, but largely speaking the four levels allow anyone who is creating information to better understand their audience. Add in a Product Glossary to ensure terminology is consistent, and a strong product message and there is no reason why any of the content being produced cannot be consistent.

Mapping these levels to the amount of content available at each level gives us the following:

Of course this is a very simplistic model, but as a starting point, it at least provides the mechanism for anyone about to create new content to pause and consider the audience. So whilst you could add in several levels, and several different mappings of document types, I think it’s better to leave things a little open to question as that helps bring a better understanding of why the content is being produced in the first place.

I first introduced this model to my current company several months ago, and we are currently revisiting this to make sure it is still a good fit to our needs. The next step for me is beefing up our Product Glossary, and then we can get on with the thornier issue of document management, an intrinsic part of having a Content Strategy for your company.

How early do you get involved in a project? At the start? Part way through once the scope has been set? Or once the design has been agreed? Or do you swoop in at the end and document whatever you find?

One common complaint a lot of technical writers have is that they aren’t included early enough in lifecycle of a project. The downsides are that by the time work hits your desk you don’t have a full picture of who the customer is, why they want whatever it is you are building, and how they want it provided to them. All of which directly impacts the information being created.

So how do you, the lowly technical writer, make sure you are involved early in the project? By offering your services as a master information curator, task analysis guru and all round user advocate, that’s how!

During the early stages of most projects, there will be a period when the main requirements are gathered, ensuring the pain points are covered, and that the main scope of what you are building is agreed. A lot of those discussions are largely focussed on collating information from the heads of various subject matter experts (SMEs) and stakeholders, and gaining agreement on it in a singular form.

Sound familiar? I hope so, as it’s not all that far removed from discussing a new product feature with some of the guys who helped build it, and coming to a consensus on how it should be used and, therefore, how it should be documented.

As one of the core competencies of a technical writer, it’s something many of us have forgotten we do, largely because, hey, it’s just our job. However it takes a unique skill set, one that not everyone possesses, to be able to focus a number of different viewpoints into a cohesive story.

This type of work is often performed by a business analyst, but there is no reason why you can’t fulfill a similar role to some degree. The project team get the benefits of your skills, removing some of their early pain, and you get to be involved from the get-go. Win-win, right?

Well, almost. One caveat is that being involved in the early stages of a project is likely to overlap with the end of the previous one, so whilst you are wrapping up all those little issues (you know, unmentioned features and changes) you may struggle for time if you are also helping in the early stages of the next phase.

It’s a hard balance to find, but if you really want to get in early, and I think the benefits outweigh the downsides and if needs must you may need to get support from your boss to reschedule some work to free up your time to be involved. It’s a simple enough, progressive, argument:

Understanding the customer and the requirements leads to better information. Better information leads to better use of the product. Better use of the product, lowers support calls, leads to new product features and increased sales.

Which, I think, is a pretty powerful statement to make to your boss when you are asking to clear time in your schedule so you can start this cycle.

I have been remiss at writing new content for this blog, and whilst this topic isn’t one that I said I’d post about (those posts are coming, I promise), it’s something I was discussing yesterday and so is at the forefront of my mind.

Like many people I still use pen and paper when taking notes, and regardless of the type of meeting I stick with three basic categories.

1. [] Actions either for me or my team to do. Includes things that need done immediately or things which it would be good to do in the future.
2. ? Questions on things I want to learn more about, which relate to my team. Whilst these may also be actions (typically they involve asking people questions) I differentiate them because, until I’ve asked the question, I don’t know enough to decide on whether there is anything to be done (caveat: if it is a burning issue, I’ll like put this against both categories ? [] ).
3. I Information which covers all sorts of things from useful URLs, to quotes, to product names and so on.

I also “style” my notes, with the appropriate shorthand symbol first, then a gap, then the text for that item. Keeping that consistent makes it very easy to scan down my notes to process them.

[] email report to Fred
[] speak to Tina about next phase of work
? what is the cognitive learning project, who is running it?
[] write a blog post on the Information Strategy Pyramid
I stats for last week 103 open, 74 closed

Processing the notes, again, depends on the type of note.

For actions as, unless they can be done straight away (I think that is a GTD methodology thing? If it takes 1 minute to do it, and 1 minute to write it up and put it in a list, then you are better just doing it), they are transcribed into an online task manager application I use called Remember the Milk. It has a very nice iPhone app which makes it easy to “take my list” with me at all times.

Questions are simply a matter of being asked. That may drive further actions or information which are captured accordingly.

Anything I’ve noted down as information is either processed electronically, if it’s something online I’ll visit it and either bookmark it in my del.icio.us account, add it to my list on Instapaper (again, which has an excellent iPhone app), or grab it and store for later in Evernote (again, a useful iPhone app helps).

Whilst all of that seems like a lot of work, it’s very maintainable, and I spend less than 20 mins a day processing my notes. However it helps me keep on top of several different streams of work, and so far it hasn’t let me down. I’ve been using the shorthand symbols for a long time now, but obviously the electronic processing of these things is new.

So, what about you? How do you take notes? Are you a mindmapper? A random scribbler? Or do you, like one lady who attend a presentation I did a few years ago, do you draw out the subject and the notes in one go?

Last night, around 3am, I woke up. I lay there in bed wondering why I’d woken up and as my mind started to churn I realised I was very very awake.

In flooded four things I’ve been thinking about for some time, all of which are related but I couldn’t quite make the connection. Last night I cracked it. Maybe.

I’m still thinking it through but here are the four items in question:

1. Single sourcing our documentation – and recent discussions with other areas of the company who could benefit from the same approach.
2. Company Information Strategy – a simple pyramid based model that allows everyone creating content to ‘map’ their audience appropriately and which should start to help with consistency of terminology and messaging.
3. Document Management – there have been some murmurings about this from a few people and it’s likely to fall into my lap.
4. Requirements gathering – we’ve recently rolled out a new process which should lead to better requirements for each project build.

All of these are tied together, and if planned properly can feed off each other. Naturally there is quite a lot involved with all of the above and I’ll be revisiting items one and two in the coming weeks.

Ohh and I’ve still to pull together a slide deck on “selling our services”, which involves all of the above and more. Once it’s ready, I’ll share it here.

Exciting times ahead.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I picked up a user manual, an honest-to-god paper book of technical documentation. Actually that’s a lie, it was just last week when i was tidying up. I picked up several user manuals and moved them to a lower shelf on my bookcase.

It’s also been a long time since I last worked for a company that produce and printed user manuals but that’s more to do with my career path than any decisions I made within those companies.

Even now whilst we have a “documentation set” comprising several different user manuals, it’s published to PDF and made available as part of the product distribution (and also online).

So why do we still maintain this view of how information should be provided?

There is a level of comfort in having a table of contents and a structure to the information available when writing technical information. It allows you to make sure all the required information is in place, but most of the research I’ve read, and most of the anecdotal evidence I’ve heard, suggests that those lovingly created table of contents are not heavily used.

The index is another area, hell it’s another profession altogether, that we spend a lot of time crafting and rightly so as it is used by many people to navigate their way through a document.

But one thing that trumps both of these methods isn’t available in printed documents but is widely available for online information. Search.

OK, so none of what I’m saying is new, or revolutionary, far from it. Those of us who have been creating online help, regardless of the format (a lot of which was before the internet was popularised), know that if there is a search option available, it will be used.

With that in mind, and this is most definitely something we will be consulting with our users about, we are toying with the idea of dumping the index and the table of contents, making sure the content has a good set of internal reference links so users (power and novice alike) can find “paths” through the information, and switching the front page to be a Google-esque search.

Luckily we can pilot this approach whilst still producing the Javahelp, PDFs and HTML (Webhelp in Author-it terms) output so we don’t completely alienate our users. It’ll be interesting to see outcome.

Like many, I struggle at times with a common perception, one which was highlighted to me yesterday by a colleague.

Like most team leads/managers, I have a lot of tasks that aren’t purely focussed on the creation of information. I don’t do much technical writing, instead letting the guys in my team focus on that (they are better at it than me anyway) whilst I work around the edges of what they do, things like taking a document through a review with some SMEs and processing the output, or building a new output template, or proof reading some of their work.

My team and I have a good idea of what I do, even though I also get dragged into chats about other information related initiatives (document management systems being the latest). But as far as everyone else in the organisation goes, I am obviously not doing a good enough job communicating that out.

So my colleague was asking how my team were doing as we are approaching the last few weeks of this current release cycle. When I said that it was a bit tight and we were probably going to have to move some of the ‘could have’ information, he asked why and then asked what I was working on myself.

Thankfully, to answer his question I have a whiteboard directly behind me that holds all the ‘other’ stuff that technical writing teams need to think about; Product Glossary updates, creation of a Knowledge Centre, Release Notes and so on.

However the point here is that, whilst we all struggle to convey the importance of what we do (until people get to that “ahhhhh” point which most do eventually), it is in all our interests to evangelise our services. Yes this will only have direct impact within your current organisation but the ripple effect over the coming years will start to grow as people move on and take your messages with them.

It may mean that you, and your team, need to stand up in front of the whole company to ‘introduce’ themselves and what they do (same applies for lone writers!), as well as backing that up with updates and conversations with people you may not normally chat to, and I realise it’s probably not something that comes naturally to many people.

So to give you a kick start, as soon as I’ve finished it, I’ll be sharing a sanitised version of that very presentation. It’ll be focussed on a software company which is being re-introduced to that wee team they all know of, but don’t know much about. I hope it might be of some use.