Category: Work

Mostly an archive of my posts from onemanwrites.co.uk – a blog I used to write when I worked in the Tech Comms industry

ISTC West of Scotland Group

The ISTC West of Scotland area group will meet on Thursday 22nd October from 7.30 p.m. onwards at the Waxy O’Connors pub, 44 West George Street, Glasgow, G2 1DH. Please make your way to McTurk’s Room on the middle level.

The evening will start with a discussion of “Conferences and how we benefit from them”, followed by an opportunity to network and chat with your peers (and hey, the bar will be open too!).

You don’t need to be an ISTC member to attend, and the more the merrier. Mine’s a Guinness!

Thanks to Katja McLaughlin for organising this. See you there.

Measurements and Metrics

It’s funny how these things come together sometimes, when two separate discussions, one here in the office and the other in the Author-it Forums, nicely lead me to a conclusion on something I’ve been pondering recently. How to measure what we produce?

The first discussion was with a new guy in our team, who was voicing concerns about the amount of information he was producing. He stated that, when describing some of the concepts our product uses, he would spend a lot of time figuring them out, talking to people about them and understanding them, but that usually translated into “not a lot being produced”.

I pointed out that, as far as I’m concerned, the more concise and effective the information, the better. Some things do require a lot of content, others don’t. There are additional benefits when you consider the single source aspect as well, it’s much easier to re-use a tightly focussed topic than one which tries to cover too much information.

The second discussion, in the Author-it forums, was someone asking if there was a way to track the number of words each writer was producing, apparently as a way to track productivity.

Don’t worry, plenty of people pointed out the fallacy of that line of thinking; it’s very easy to pad out a document or topic with additional words even though they might not add any value and may lead to ambiguity.

However I’m not really thinking along the lines of productivity, nor measuring the individual, I’m more concerned with measuring what we produce.

But how?

The obvious answer is to engage with our audience and get their feedback about the documentation. There are various ways of doing this, and depending on your audience some might not be available.

Arranging time to sit down with the people who use the product, and your documentation, is best and can be run as a product focussed session. If your company runs customer forums or workshops then it should be easy enough to schedule time into the agenda (your company understands how important documentation is, right?), but even if you can’t get direct access you could try a questionnaire, allowing customers to ‘score’ the documentation.

Ultimately you need to get feedback from the people who use your documentation, find out whether they can find the information they need, once they’ve found it do they understand it, is it clear, accurate, unambiguous? It’s not easy to quantify what we do at every level but using a questionnaire which includes an indication of a score can give you a way to start further discussions. The score itself isn’t the important bit, it’s what you do with the feedback that matters.

I’d love to hear if you’ve tried other ways of measuring your documentation, and I’m not alone. In the current economic climate there is more pressure to justify what we do, so making sure we have some good weapons up our sleeves will benefit us all.

Music Futures

Prompted by some questions about Spotify on Twitter, questions which sparked a heated debate that is still raging*, I thought I’d revisit my own music purchasing and usage habits and see where I sit in the consumer spectrum.

First things first then, I do purchase music mostly, these days, through iTunes. Mostly because it’s handy and I’m a total Apple fanboy (yeah, Windows SUCK!!). That last bit is a lie, of course, as my home PC runs Windows and I’m really enjoying using Windows 7 (something else I’ll be purchasing soon).

I digress.

I spent a long time digitally converting my CDs, and as they now reside in boxes in the loft I don’t see the need to purchase anything on physical media. I have bought a couple in the past few months, mainly band specific special releases though, so they aren’t available through iTunes. I’m sure there are other ways I could purchase music but for what I listen my system works for me.

Do I miss the act of going into a music shop, flipping through the stacks? Yes I do, but not so much that I’m losing sleep over it, although it’s easy to say that since my current office is miles from anywhere, whereas working in the city centre made access to places like Fopp an always entertaining lunchtime visit.

As for listening to music, well that mostly happens either at work (when time/task allow) or at home when I’m sitting at the PC or just generally faffing about upstairs. More recently I have started taking my iPod Shuffle to the gym.

So where does Spotify fit in all this? Well it should fit perfectly, at home at least (I’ve not tried but guessing company firewall restrictions would rule it out there). I do have it, I have an account yet, for some reason, I don’t use it. To be honest I’ve only used it a couple of times, and I do like the idea of sharing playlists with others but what about all that music that I have?

I LIKE all the music I have, well most of it**, except when it’s on shuffle of course, and whilst I am open to hearing new artists I only tend to use work as a backdrop so I’m not usually actively listening. With that in mind, it largely doesn’t matter where the music comes from, but I’m far more likely to put on something I know so I don’t HAVE to listen to it.

You know what I mean, right?

Perhaps I just need to give Spotify more of a try, perhaps I’m missing something fundamental but I really don’t see it as a game changer. Yet.

But then I said that about blogging, and Twitter so hey, what do I know?

* or perhaps just one or two polite replies, poetic license, innit
** the joys of a shared library of music and Last.fm listing tracks from Louise’s iPod, for the record I did not listen to Girls Aloud AT ALL that week

Like Herding Cats

You know when you have a set of disparate, yet related, ideas and plans and whilst you know they WILL all tie together it can sometimes be a struggle to both see how that will happen and communicate it to your various stakeholders? Well that’s where my head has been the past couple of weeks. No wonder I’ve been tired and headachey, my brain hurts!

Basically I’m trying to pull together a plan for the next 6-12 months that wraps up the ongoing development of the single source solution my team have in place (we are using Author-it), with the production of a knowledge centre (containing all of the product documentation, releases notes and more), which will be hosted on the developer community website I have setup, making sure we can provide partner friendly information all the while ensuring that we are covering all the levels of content required.

That, plus a few other side projects.

I have a mindmap of all this, and whilst I’m not fond of them it is allowing me to make sure I’m covering all the required areas.

The good thing is that it is all starting to come together so all I’m really doing is tweaking the timescales and goals a little to make sure they all align. The downside is that it’s generating even more work for me and my team which, as it happens, is actually a good thing.

Paper based

I am a paper junkie. I’m a whore for a nice caliper of paper, not too thick as to be card, not too thin as to be unsubstantial. I love the feel of paper, the rustle and rigidity that give way with a subtle movement. I love the sound of ink being laid down, the gentle drag as my hand loops and dots across the page.

Despite all the advances of modern technology, I don’t see this changing. In fact I’m such a slave to this way of thinking that I’ll often print off an email if it contains important information that I’ll need at some point in the next day or so.

As such I walk around with a notebook (A4 size, hard bound, company branded) stuffed with ‘important’ sheets of information, with said sheets usually adorn with numerous, equally important, scribbles and notes.

And of course there in lies the problem. As of yet computers cannot match the speed nor convenience of pen/pencil and paper.

It is then a short leap and a step to full on stationery porn. Lusting over Moleskin notepads, gushing over the smooth flow of ink from a Mont Blanc. I’m not quite there yet. Yet.

But what of paper in our profession? The last time I was involved with a print house was over 10 years ago (blimey), and these days whilst we still produce user manuals, they are in the now ubiquitous PDF format. Information these days is largely thought of in electronic terms, yet everyone I know prefers reading novels in ‘old fashioned’ print format.

And I guess that is the problem, whilst the main thing we consume and produce is electronically focussed, many of us are still looking to paper as the medium. Which, if you are a paper junkie like me, is a good and a bad thing.

But mostly bad.

Making it up

Having been off work the past week, spending most of my time sleeping on the sofa (think I’m fighting off a virus), I’ve been pondering what I do and how I do it.

And I think I’m at that point in my career when experience plays a large part and, despite any processes that are in place, I have to agree with what Donna said.

I’m making it up.

Whilst that sounds like a very glib and unprofessional statement, it is probably true for you as well. Making it up is actually quite hard to do. It presumes that you have enough knowledge about who you are creating your information for, why they need it, how they want to access it, how you are going to get it, and how best to create it.

After that, no matter how much detail you try to plan to, you will end up making decisions on a day to day basis, sometimes they might contradict the plan but, with the knowledge you have, you will probably make the right call. More times than not, at least.

Anyway, that’s as far as I got with that train of thought. I’m off for a snooze.