Category: Work

I just found this sitting in my drafts folder. The company name has changed (we are now Kana Software) but the premise is the same. Interestingly, the parallels between our thoughts on customer service and the thoughts in tech comms of better integration within a support system (providing information as part of call deflection) are striking. I’m going to try and pull these together in a future post.

I was asked to write an article for Credit Control Journal on behalf of the company I work for, and for the sake of historical archiving (and so I know I have it somewhere), here is that article.
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It’s a common question during interviews, “Where do you see yourself five years from now?”.
At that point some people will talk of how they want to have progressed in their career, have learned and expand their role, be able to look back with a sense of achievement and look forward in a clear direction.

The smart people will simply say they don’t know, but that they know that their natural ambition and drive will have moved their careers forward.

I was recently asked the reverse question by an interviewee, “Where do you see the team being in five years time?”.

My response was honest.

“I don’t know”.

And I truly don’t. I know what we have in front of us for the next six months or so, and where our main efforts will be focused in the coming year or two, but beyond that I have no clue.

I do know that we will continue to try and expand the level of services we offer the business (increasing our value), and that our unique knowledge of the product is becoming increasingly useful. I do know that we will continue to improve, and that in the past (almost) 6 years I’ve been with the company we’ve targetted the right thing at the right time. We started by focusing our efforts on the quality of the content we were providing, and currently we are turning more and more towards concerns over the structure and findability of the information. We’ve expanded the type of information we create from task-based content to articles and pre-sales information, and gotten involved in on-screen text and usability issues.

So what does the future hold? Possibly something to do with personalisation of content, definitely further enhancements and development of our taxonomy, and beyond that? I really don’t know. It would be foolhardy to pretend otherwise. I do know that I work with some very smart people and that whatever we do, whatever direction the team takes, it will be the right one for the time.

If pushed, I guess I could answer the question of where the team will be in five years time, I’d say “still trying to making the right decisions at the right time”.

This should be easy. I work in a software company, I’ve only ever worked in software companies so, in honour of Ada Lovelace Day (what do you mean, who?) I should be able to join in “sharing stories of women — whether engineers, scientists, technologists or mathematicians — who have inspired you to become who you are today”, right?

I work directly with many smart and inspiring women and, indirectly, I’ve been lucky enough to get to know many more in my profession, but how many of them have inspired me?

When I sat down to write this I did wonder if I would be able to think of any women to which I could assign this claim. But then it’s not every day that you take a step back and think about who inspires you, is it?

So, who has inspired me through my career?

My first boss can lay claim to that, but alas, he is a man so I can’t count him here.

My next boss, Kingsley, was certainly influential, she took a chance on me and gently guided my (short) career in her team. She inspired me to be inclusive, and to trust in myself and my opinions, and that it was ok speak up. Looking back it was her coaching that laid the groundwork for that part of my ‘work persona’ as it stands today.

But it’s in my profession that I look for day to day inspiration, and it’s here that I’m lucky enough to have met some amazing women.

In no particular order:

• Anne Gentle – I’ve mentioned her before in this context but Anne continues to crop up in conversations. She remains a leading light as the technical communications industry pushes further and further into the social media landscape. If you’ve ever seen me speak at a conference, you can thank (blame?) Anne for helping inspire me to speak at my first back in 2007.
• Karen Mardahl – as a consistent, intelligent and thought provoking speaker, her passion and enthusiasm for usability and desire to ‘do better’ is a constant inspiration to me.
• Leah Guren – having spent time in a workshop with her, and witnessed her passionate opening keynote at a recent conference, I can attest to her inspirational characteristics.
• Dr. JoAnn Hackos – last but certainly not least, I think everyone in the technical communications field has been inspired by JoAnn at some point or another, and many of us still look to her as a leading light in our field. I know I wouldn’t be where I am today if it were not for her generosity in sharing her knowledge and expertise.

The problem with this type of list is the fear that you have missed someone out, and whilst these four amazing women have inspired me professionally, many more inspire me in my daily life, and I’m lucky to count them as friends.

As a man, working within a profession that has a healthy split of gender, I find it heartening that in a heavily male-dominated industry that such women are pushing forward and making themselves heard. One day parity will be achieved and I, for one, look forward to that day.

This should be easy. I work in a software company, I’ve only ever worked in software companies so, in honour of Ada Lovelace Day (what do you mean, who?) I should be able to join in “sharing stories of women — whether engineers, scientists, technologists or mathematicians — who have inspired you to become who you are today”, right?

I work directly with many smart and inspiring women and, indirectly, I’ve been lucky enough to get to know many more in my profession, but how many of them have inspired me?

When I sat down to write this I did wonder if I would be able to think of any women to which I could assign this claim. But then it’s not every day that you take a step back and think about who inspires you, is it?

So, who has inspired me through my career?

My first boss can lay claim to that, but alas, he is a man so I can’t count him here.

My next boss, Kingsley, was certainly influential, she took a chance on me and gently guided my (short) career in her team. She inspired me to be inclusive, and to trust in myself and my opinions, and that it was ok speak up. Looking back it was her coaching that laid the groundwork for that part of my ‘work persona’ as it stands today.

But it’s in my profession that I look for day to day inspiration, and it’s here that I’m lucky enough to have met some amazing women.

In no particular order:

• Anne Gentle – I’ve mentioned her before in this context but Anne continues to crop up in conversations. She remains a leading light as the technical communications industry pushes further and further into the social media landscape. If you’ve ever seen me speak at a conference, you can thank (blame?) Anne for helping inspire me to speak at my first back in 2007.
• Karen Mardahl – as a consistent, intelligent and thought provoking speaker, her passion and enthusiasm for usability and desire to ‘do better’ is a constant inspiration to me.
• Leah Guren – having spent time in a workshop with her, and witnessed her passionate opening keynote at a recent conference, I can attest to her inspirational characteristics.
• Dr. JoAnn Hackos – last but certainly not least, I think everyone in the technical communications field has been inspired by JoAnn at some point or another, and many of us still look to her as a leading light in our field. I know I wouldn’t be where I am today if it were not for her generosity in sharing her knowledge and expertise.

The problem with this type of list is the fear that you have missed someone out, and whilst these four amazing women have inspired me professionally, many more inspire me in my daily life, and I’m lucky to count them as friends.

As a man, working within a profession that has a healthy split of gender, I find it heartening that in a heavily male-dominated industry that such women are pushing forward and making themselves heard. One day, parity will be achieved and I, for one, look forward to that day.

I start this blog post with an admission and an apology.

Admission: I am a manager, I don’t spend a lot (any) of my time writing technical content these days.

Apology: One of my weakest areas is in the intricacies and ‘correctness’ of grammar. *

That said, there is one thing that continues to frustrate me about the technical communications profession, the constant ‘deep dive’ into every single aspect of one sentence, one clause. Dear grammar pedants, please stop!

Don’t get me wrong, I know that good written information is a keystone of our profession and I’m all for discussions to make sure things are being approached correctly and debated thoroughly, where appropriate.

Please note the last two words of the last sentence, “where appropriate”.

Maybe it’s just me, but as each of us write for a specific audience, likely to a specific style guide, such discussions become academic almost from the get go. What really irks is when discussions on other aspects of our profession are diverted towards this area. For example, “Content Strategy is important! … Yes, but ultimately the paragraph that someone reads once they have found it needs to be written in the active voice and never ever punctuate that bulleted list with commas… ”

And so on.

I’ve seen it so many times I’ve started using it as a guide. When any online discussion that isn’t explicitly about grammar and punctuation, whether forum or mailing list, reaches the point that someone reaches for the grammar gun, I stop reading, I disengage.

A few years ago, when the UA conference reached Edinburgh in 2008, one of the sessions was by Professor Geoffrey K. Pullum, a noted linguist. It was the closing session and I approached it with some dread, a presentation on language would surely be all about the use of transitive verbs and the perils of infinitives which are split. How wrong I was, leaving the room at the end with a simple, repeated message.

Write as you speak. Write as if you were explaining something to someone sitting next to you, put aside the rules of grammar if needs be!

I blame my current stance, my dislike of long academic discussions on someone who, I’m sure, has initiated and partaken of many such discussions himself.

Forgive me if I’ve offend anyone, I’m not saying that correct grammar is a bad thing, far from it, I just think that in the current day and age we, as a profession, need to raise our view and focus on bigger things. The language will take care of itself, one way or another, let it go!

We should be looking to influence, to sell, to push ourselves to the forefront of our companies as the experts we are in that valuable (and its stock continues to rise) commodity, information.

* Yes, there are deliberate mistakes in this post. Feel free to point them out in the comments.

At TCUK12 this year, I chatted with several people about authoring tools. Vendors, other technical writers, managers, I asked the same two questions, again and again.

What authoring application do you use, and why do you use it?

The answers were illuminating, interesting and always useful. There are many, many options out there, catering to many different needs, and all of them have a different set of strengths and weaknesses. Alas, no matter how hard I tried, regardless of how many ways I tried to bend our requirements, all of those conversations led me to the same conclusion.

No-one out there builds what we want so we may have to build it ourselves.

As part of improvements to our content, one of my team has led the charge to restructure our information. She has a passion for information architecture and devised a three pronged approach to our content. You can either navigate in by role, by product area or… by something else we haven’t yet decided upon.

We’ve audited the topics we have and applied some simple structuring decisions and it is looking good so far. The problem we will soon have is that we will need to build this new structure and make it usable by our customers.

What we would like is to be able to tag our topics, and use those tags to present a default structure to our information. The tags would also allow users to filter the topics they see and, either by addition or subtraction, create a unique set of information for their needs. Ultimately this would lead to personalisation of content in a basic form, but that could easily be enhanced to provide a smarter take on content for each user.

Alas it seems that, without doing a lot of customising of an XML (most likely DITA) based system we won’t get near that and even the products that get close require a compromise somewhere. Most of the time it would be, for the team of writers, a step back to a less friendly interface, and more exposure to the underlying technology of the tool they are using. At present Author-it provides a simple authoring environment that allows the writers to concentrate on writing content.

But perhaps that is the point. Maybe it’s time to try a different set of tools, adopt new working practices, take on a the bigger challenge.