I’ve checked the calendar.

Twice.

It is definitely almost Christmas.

Which means it’s almost the end of the year.

How did that happen?

I’m a bit disappointed that I’ve not yet managed to get the new ISTC website up and running. It’s close, so close, and after a few frustrating weeks of backtracking and replanning part of the implementation (the member database part, quite important that bit!) I now have a clear path forward and will be looking to get it tested (I have volunteers already, more welcomed!) in the next few weeks.

Mind you, the past six months have been hectic but well worth it. We’ve grown our team and have a strong plan of action for the coming year, the challenge will be getting it all done.

So, next year is looking like it will be a good one.

Mind you, still need to get past the next couple of weeks.

The event is free and open to anyone interested in technical communication, such as technical authors, information architects, internal communication professionals, report writers, marketing writers, web content writers and graphic designers.

Venue: Waxy O’Connors pub, 44 West George Street, Glasgow, G2 1DH. Please make your way to McTurk’s Room on the middle level.

Please forward this message on to your colleagues or anyone else who may be interested. For more information, contact westscotland_areagroup@istc.org.uk or visit http://istcwestofscotland.eventbrite.com/

That said, it is looking like we are well placed to enter the new year with all the foundations in place to make measureable improvements to the information we offer. We have routes into customer projects via support call outcome codes (if it was an information related issue, I’m contacting the project to see how it arose and what we can do to fix it), stats on what areas of our knowledge centre are being accessed down to the topic level, via our recent upgrade of Author-it, which will allow us to target the areas of the documentation that are being most heavily used, and we will soon be launching a Q&A style forum within our developer community website, allowing a level of user-generated content to be available to all of our customers.

Personally I’ve started to get to grips with the ISTC website and hope to use some of the time available over the holidays to crack on with moving it to a CMS. There is some restructuring required as well and I’m hoping to start adding some new sections in the early part of the year, more on that nearer the time!

To everyone who has visited this blog, I wish you all the very best for the coming festive period, and in to the coming year!

I’m writing this whilst it is still fairly fresh (and only addled by a couple, ok ok, three pints of Guinness)…

At the ISTC West of Scotland Area Group meeting last night talk turned to the fairly common topic of “no-one knows what we do”. There was some chat about the value we can bring but, frequently, documentation is still seen as a “tick in the box”, a necessary evil or, even worse, an apathetic acceptance even though no-one else in the company quite knows why we exist other than the fact that we do.

I had made a point earlier about selling ourselves, marketing our services and capabilities and once again it seems obvious that, and I acknowledge that I’m no better than anyone else in this respect, we must do a better job of raising our profiles as professionals within our organisation, and of the profession itself.

Talk of past redundancies confirms this, documentation can easily be seen as an expensive cost, something which, surely, could be cheaper to create or be created by cheaper individuals or perhaps be done away with altogether? After all, no-one reads the documentation and everyone can write, how hard could it be?

But how?

Alas we didn’t get to that during our discussions, but I have a few ideas. For starters, we need to:

• Identify champions, people within our organisation who understand the value we add to the product, and ask them for help.
• Confirm our main customers are getting what they need from us (what they really need, not just the tick-the-box documents they’ve always received).
• Communicate with our areas of the company more regularly so they know what we do

Nothing startlingly original there but one thing we all agreed on last night was that it was very easy to get into ‘head down’ mode, when you come into the office and work hard at to produce documentation, help systems, training guides, whitepapers, instructional videos, and more.

We need to, as a profession and as individuals, try to break out of those habits.

Yes, it’s hard, very hard in some situations, but most companies should be receptive to ideas which help make things better. It may be that your first port of call is to your boss to discuss why it would be a good idea to spend more time talking to the customers of your documentation, or it may be that another department is struggling and would welcome some helpful tips and a bit of direction.

We are professionals, and have much more to offer an organisation than information products alone. It’s just that sometimes we need to remind people of that, including ourselves.

Have you successfully conquered this? Do you indulge in PR and Marketing of your services, or the services of the team you are in? What has worked for you? I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments on this one.

It already looks likely that our aim (alongside keeping pace with product development) will be to get to a point where we can correctly focus our efforts around structure, and ad-hoc document requessts. Given that we have access to outcome codes from the Support team, several of which are specifically around product documentation being either wrong, missing, or not read at all, and we will soon have a full set of analytics from our online product documentation, which should put us in a much better position to correctly prioritise those additional work streams rather than fall into the “whoever shouts loudest” model we are currently prey to.

The analytics are powered by Google Analytics and track visits to each topic of the documentation set. The numbers should help point is to areas of the documentation that, for one reason or another, need some attention. This works both ways of course, a high number of views indicates a lot of people using the information, but where are they going afterwards? If they head to the Support area of the website then can we presume the information isn’t correct? And those topics with little to no views, are they not used because they can’t be found?

I’m a little wary of spending too much time analysing the statistics and initially they will be used purely to direct us to the outliers, those topics that for one reason or another are causing anomalies in the reported numbers. Once we smooth those out then it will require a lot more deep-dive style root cause analysis which, as with everything else, will bring a fresh set of challenges and hopefully some new routes of communication with our customers.