One of the core objectives of accurate, clear, complete and a good-quality product documentation has been to help reduce the support calls to the product helpdesk team. Traditionally, the writers and helpdesk teams have been working independently and primarily, the only overlap has been when helpdesk reports are shared with product program team to identify scope of improvement in the documentation.

But old order changes.

The New Order

Jonatan and Mark have made some interesting points in their comments at Jonatan’s blog post: What Does it Mean to Predict User Questions Following a Reversed Taxonomical approach?, where they talk about merger of technical writing and support teams.

The increasing acceptance of user generated content as a part of product knowledgebase has given another reason to many organizations, where the technical writers need to work closely with the helpdesk or support teams.

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During last few months, I have been trying to explore content strategy on how it is different from information architecture and how and why technical communicators may need transitioning to be content strategists, at least  for specific projects.

For my current projects that I am working on, my understanding of content strategy has given me a fresh perspective to reflect back at what I have been doing and why I need to change.

Business Case For Structured Technical Content Authoring

I am developing SOPs for a Florida based business for around 4 years now. Since they had the basic SOP document structure approved by a regulatory authority, I developed MS Word documents templates based on this approved structure and started writing these and then publishing the documents to PDF. As I had anticipated, there were complexities and challenges in managing documents (revisions, review, version control and formatting), however I continued doing it in MS Word because (a) the organization was not really keen to overhaul the process since their internal team was also involved in writing these SOPs (b) I could not prepare a strong enough business case.

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The voting for STC elections is open now and I had a look at the candidates running for the STC office for 2013. One of the candidates for the office of vice-president is Paul Mueller. I know the other candidate running for the same position, Kit Brown and when I posted my conversation with Kit here, I got interested to know Paul’s comments as well.

You can see the conversation with both the candidates on STC open forum.

VG: Hi Paul. Thanks for your time. The STC elections are open for voting and people may be interested to know about your experience, plans and vision for the community. To begin with, “What motivated you to run for the office of the vice president of  Society for Technical Communication?”

PM: STC has given me a lot throughout my career and I believe STC is an important part of a thriving technical communication profession.

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The voting for STC elections is open now and I had a look at the candidates running for the STC office for 2013. One of the candidates for the office of vice-president is Kit Brown Hoekstra. I have not worked with Kit directly though we had exchanged a few emails when Kit reviewed my article for Intercom January 2013 (p 23).

For this candidacy, I wanted to post know her plans and post our conversation here on this blog space but I cannot do it because of STC elections norms. So I posted my questions on STC open forum, and here is the conversation.

VG: Hi Kit. Thanks for your time. The STC elections are open for voting and people may be interested to know about your experience, plans and vision for the community. To begin with, “What motivated you to run for the office of the vice president of  Society for Technical Communication?”

KBH: Thanks for asking me to respond. As I mention in my election profile, which is available at www.stc.org/election/category/vice-president, I want to give back to the organization that has given me so much in my career. STC has a vital role to play as the profession matures globally, and I want to help educate companies on the profession and help our members worldwide contribute to the advancement of our profession.

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At the TCWorld India Conference 2013 in Bangalore few days back, I attended a presentation by Jang F M Graat, titled as *Changing the Car without Stopping the Engine*. In this post, I have covered his presentation based on our followup conversation.

Jang is a technical documentation specialist based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He has been developing technical documentation for more than 20 years now, with core expertise in CMS, FrameMaker and DITA. Jang F.M. Graat holds Masters Degrees in Psychology and Philosophy and has worked in the high-tech computer business as a technical writer, trainer and consultant. You can see http://www.jang.nl for more details.

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Jang started the session by talking about the problem in current content planning and management practices.

[PPT Notes]: The problems are:

• Legacy Documents – huge silos
• Content Management – rewrite, high up-front cost

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On day 1 of TCWorld India conference 2013 last week in Bangalore, most of the sessions were on trends, challenges, strategy, content governance, and process of technical communication. Stefan Gentz from Tracom presented an important concept where he talked about Change Management, in ‘Leading the Change’.

Five Triggers of Change Management

Stefan started with a few quotes from history on ‘Change’ and added that it is inevitable, and the only constant in life. He talked about ‘Change Management’ and referred to McKinsey’s research that quoted five triggers that cause ‘CM’. Four of these are ‘Catching up to Rivals Companies’, ‘Completing or integrating a merger’, ‘Turning around a crises’, ‘Turning for a better performance’. However, the last and most notable is ‘Reducing cost’.

Before talking about Change Management for businesses and specific to technical communication, Stefan discussed what derives the need for change management. It was ‘Economic and Social forces’.

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My experience of being at TCWorld India Conference 2013 had been more than excellent. In addition to quality sessions (presentations) on a variety of high quality topics, it was indeed nice to meet the technical communication stalwarts from the US, Germany, Belgium, UK, Netherlands, Australia, Singapore, Ukraine and elsewhere. It was an international event in every sense and I got to interact with these professionals while in breaks over a cup of coffee or during QA in the sessions.

I must say that the most notable flavor throughout the two days of conference had been DITA/XML and structured authoring and how it is being encouraged globally.

Here is a list of a few sessions that I attended. I plan to write separate posts on some of these over next few weeks.

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Come 22 February (Friday this week), I am talking about ‘WordPress for Technical Documentation’ at TCWorld India Conference 2013, in Bangalore.

An introduction to the topic is:

“Product owners are realizing that they need to have community based documentation for their products, rather than a traditional help file. The documentation is evolving from merely a ‘help file’ to huge knowledge bases. For example over last few years, we have seen the paradigm shift towards:

• User Generated Content
• Role Based Access to Topics
• Custom Content Types
• Statistics and Analysis to track user behavior
• Rating, Feedback and Filtering Topics for Different Parameters
• Social Media Integration
• Custom Reports

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Most often, we share our experiences that are derived from our successful projects. Many technical communicators use their blog space or community portals and groups to share their knowledge and expertise from successful projects such as how they planned CS help in Flare for a project, or integrated DITA in Drupal, or developed a prototype of a complex real estate system.

Although ‘we learn more from failures than from success’ is as well known as ‘it feels cold when it is minus 4 degrees outside’, we generally tend to not to talk much about our failed projects.

Here, I take this opportunity to talk about a failed project, as one of my experiences in December 2012.

In November 2012, a business from East Coast New York approached me to develop functional specifications of their CRM. We discussed milestones, inputs and directions, the process and deliverables. I got the contract on 03-Dec and I needed to complete and deliver it by 22-Dec.

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This is a quick online survey for tech comm professionals in India. I need your accurate response to survey questions.

Please take few minutes to participate here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/vstechcommii. Thank you.