Category: Work

It’s been a few days since I got home after the Technical Communications Conference this year, and I’ve been digesting and mulling over some of the ideas and thoughts gathered from the speakers and conversations.

The conference was in a new location, Newcastle, and that brought a different feel to the event. Hard to put my finger on it but it felt a little more business like, or maybe just a little less social? Not sure, and as ever my experience will be different from others.

Something that hasn’t changed was the value. It remains an excellent opportunity to learn from your peers, industry experts, and if nothing else it’s great to hear that we are doing the right things or just have the same problems as everyone else.

A few standout presentations from me, Leah Guren (whose workshop I attended on the Tuesday) kicked off the conference in great style. Passionate, funny, upbeat, everything that we can occasionally seem to lack in our profession here in the UK. Ray Gallon and Scott Abel backed that up with some excellent presentations that expanded the scope of what we can, and should, be doing.

It took me a while to realise it but the one thing I didn’t get this year was an overall theme. Not an official one, but typically there is one stream of thought that seems to be prevalent. I think the closest to that would be ‘Structure’ (as a strategy) and I wonder if, perhaps, that that particular stream of thought hasn’t yet hit a tipping point?

Still pondering that, and many other, things, one of which is that I really need to be blogging here more! Time will tell if I can stick to that.

The big picture is coming together. Development teams in seven different locations round the world, contracted technical writers in some locations, none in others and a product line that is merging… why that all sounds like a challenge!

I’m still in discussion about how we will gather information from disparate teams using different processes (some use SCRUM, we use a blend of waterfall and ‘Agile’), still trying to figure out what our deliverables will be and how they will be delivered so whilst it’s been a few weeks now, it doesn’t feel like things have changed all that much, apart from now knowing that bar one technical writer in Ireland, my team are THE team.

By my reckoning that makes us Global something or other so we are getting new business cards printed…

The realities of how we will manage the information gathering process are my main focus at the moment, I’m reaching out to team leads and managers in as many places as I can to get a better view of where we fit and where we can offer the best value. Over the past few years we’ve built the team to be more ‘service’ focussed, and whilst the bulk of that offering is centred around our product releases, we do also help out our PreSales teams and project delivery information where we can. We also work closely with our Support Team, and monitor incoming calls to understand the product usage that develops and where people trip up.

The end goal is to replicate what we do across the different sites round the globe.

The challenge will be making it happen.

What happens when one company acquires another? How do you merge departments, working practices, content? That’s the challenge that lies ahead for me as my company was recently acquired by Kana Software.

We are still in the midst of integration planning, figuring out how to take the best parts of both product sets forward, and I’ve started to look over the documentation created by our counterparts across the water. It’s immediately obvious that we will need to make some compromises. Firstly in tooling, we use Author-it they use FrameMaker, and then in style (both writing and content delivery).

We’ve been moving to a more article type deliverable, focussing on explaining the reasoning and thinking behind a product feature and only providing How To style information when needed. From what I’ve seen our counterparts, whilst they have a good mixture of information, they have a lot more in the way of How To style information.

We had already kicked off, shortly before the acquisition was announced, started an entire overhaul of the structure of our product documentation. The early results are looking good and should make the entire product information set much easier to use, and it’s been timely as it will allow us to be confident that the information we are taking forward is the best we have, is logically structured, well researched and written.

First things first though, and I’m setting up some calls to talk to them, to understand how they work day to day, why they made the decisions they’ve made and to explain the same from our side of things. Somewhere in the middle lies the future, the path forward to a combined set of product information.

It won’t be easy, we both come to these discussions with a large amount of information, but I know we are all up for the challenge!

Working in a team that isn’t heavily invested in documenting requirements and specifications (we usually have a starting set of such things but these soon fall out of step as development evolves) makes it a challenge to know both what is being added to the product and whether it needs to be documented.

The development teams recently adopted JIRA and whilst the additional information helps I fear it may give us a bigger problem. As we will (should?) finally have a clear picture of everything being added to the product, will it be too much for us to handle?

At present the Publications team have two very large products, with a complex API and code base which is all evolving and which needs to be documented. We cover a mix of SDK style documentation, reference information as well as procedure based topics and many conceptual pieces. We don’t document all of the product at the moment but it’s fast becoming apparent that deciding what NOT to do will be a vital skill as we move forward.

We can’t, and shouldn’t, document everything but a firm focus on making sure we are providing the most value (bang per buck!) helps us make better decisions about what we can ignore, and what our customers really need.

How do you cope with the ever increasing pace of development? What don’t you do?

I cannot be bothered with faff.

This is one personality trait that has definitely changed as I’ve gotten older, or perhaps it’s just a reaction to the years I spent indulging my ‘gadget-geek’ and allowing myself to think that jumping through 5 hoops to get a simple task done was “OK”.

My mindset these days is very much that technology is there to serve me. If something starts getting in my road I’ll work around it, or replace it completely, ruthlessly.

I’m about to talk about a technology company which I know some people don’t like, but bear with me.

I have an iPhone, an iPad, Apple TV and an internet connected Samsung TV. The bulk of my content consumption happens through those devices. I have a desktop PC, running Windows 7, which is where all of my content creation occurs. More of my time is spent consuming content so I recently bought a NAS drive to allow me to remove the desktop PC (and it’s large hard drive) as a middleman.

I can now watch movies on my TV that I created (ripped from bought copies) on my desktop PC as they now live on my NAS drive. I can view photos the same way.

I can also browse and play music from my NAS drive using my iPhone, or iPad. Unfortunately I can’t hear it.

My plan was to use an Airport Express, connected wirelessly to the NAS box, with audio out to a dedicated set of speakers. I have an old (“g” standard) Airport Express and bought some new speakers (AudioEngine 2).

Alas, the plan is failing and whilst I’m still not sure why, it’s getting the Airport Express setup that is causing the problems. That might be down to the Airport Express itself, or the Windows box, or even the router (a Thomson box supplied by O2). I’ve tried every set of instructions I can find but still nothing.

What are my options now? I could buy a newer Airport Express in the hope that works easily, or I could buy Airplay enabled speakers and be done with that extra step.

Too much faff ya see. If it had just worked I wouldn’t even be moaning about it here.