If there is one phrase which should set off alarms in the mind of a technical writer it’s when a developer says “Ohhh but they wouldn’t use it like that…”.

Because, as I’m sure you all know, they will.

I am currently working with a few people to try and pull together a solid set of product usage recommendations. We provide an SDK and a feature rich application built using our own technology, and that application is extended and configured for specific uses. There are plenty of hook points in there and, for the most part, usage follows accepted patterns. However there is always the time when a certain component is bent and twisted and used in a way we hadn’t expected and it’s these instances that we are trying to understand and capture.

We get a view of them by exploring edge cases when testing, but it occurred to me that there is still one thing that can catch us out. Our old nemesis, ‘presumption’ (which is usually coupled with it’s friend ‘common sense’).

So now I’m on red alert for any statements which are based on presumption. Sometimes they are right, but it’s the times when they are wrong that we need to explore them, capture them and help our customers by giving them some frame of acceptable usage. It’s not an exact science, but even just pausing to have those short conversations seems to be helping.

It’s a simple enough question really, and one I’m trying to answer at the moment, how do we know what we don’t know?

Part of the work I’m doing with our Information Pyramid (which I’ve mentioned here before) is to try and map the content we do have into some sensible groupings. That will allows to see where there are gaps within the content set we already have, for example if group A has a whitepaper and data sheet, but group B only has a whitepaper, but it still doesn’t tell us what we don’t know.

The obvious answer is to ask our audience, which we do, but there comes a point that even they don’t know what they need to know until they need it.

There are a couple of avenues we are looking at to try and find some answers. One is to analyse our support calls, try to get to the root of the problem and whether or not they are information based. Another will be focussed around a new addition to our community website, a Q&A style forum which we hope will let us see which area of the product generates the most questions and hopefully allow us to use that data to improve the documentation.

The latter is a couple of months away but I think will make the biggest difference. So much so there is probably a case for dedicating a resource to monitoring the forums and likely acting as a community manager of sorts, not something I’d anticipated although maybe I should’ve as it was only in January of this year that I said:

“even if you don’t think social media will impact your own professional circumstances, I have no doubts that it will change the way our profession is perceived.”

What about you? Have you looked to social media to help solve a problem or improve your service?

Information is serious stuff and must be treated with the appropriate earnest respect it deserves. Stop laughing at the back, this is not a joking matter. How do you feel when you go looking for information and can’t find it? Or find what you think will be helpful information only to discover that it is useless.

At that point, information is very very serious indeed and causes many people to gnash their teeth, wail their woes and other expressions of frustration and angst.

The reason I mention this, something I’m sure most of you are both perfectly aware and the unwitting recipients of, is because I have a tendency to be silly sometimes. Which means, say, adding an entry to a product glossary titled “Rubber Chicken” with a definition of “See Custard Pie” (and yes, the “Custard Pie” entry had the definition of “See Rubber Chicken”). Yes, it’s silly, but sometimes, if done correctly, a spot of humour can have a positive effect.

Thankfully the terminology used in software development can provide some perfect moments, so when someone recently asked “How do I destroy a custom component?” on an internal mailing list, one response (which alas I can’t post here) tickled my funny bone so much that I posted it to our developer community website.

Suffice to say that the response discussed destroying a custom component on a physical level (including dropping the hardware from a height) and the emotional level (including underming the confidence of the custom component with heavy doses of sarcasm) and had everyone who read it in stitches.

Was it inappropriate? Perhaps, but a little humour can go a long way.

I’m in the midst of interviewing to fill a vacancy for a technical writer in our team. I’m also thinking ahead as to how to get them integrated into how we do things. And then I remembered what we have done previously.

“Hello, welcome to our wonderful company. Here is a copy of the software, and the installation guide. Go!”

OK, it’s not quite like that but it is a good opportunity to check over a part of the documentation that is crucial but can be neglected.

Product installations come in all shapes and sizes, from those simple wizard driven screens to systems which require all manner of pre-configured and pre-installed supporting applications. The latter can be the trickiest as often there is a myriad of possible, valid, scenarios, and can lead to a lot of presumption.

Regardless, the installation is the first time the real users get to get their hands on your product and so it’s a good place to get reviewed by the closest person you’ll have to a new customer. A new member of your team.

When was the last time you looked at the things you don’t do?

The reason I ask is that this very question is occupying my mind at the moment as I try to pull together both a content audit of what we have and a plan to create the things we don’t have. Which isn’t as easy as it may sound.

There are three or four different departments involved in the audit, and from each I’ve asked the same two things:

1. A list of all the content you currently have
2. A list of all the content you would like to have

With both lists in place, and understanding that some items in the first list may also need some rework or ongoing maintenance, we should all have a good view of what everyone else is doing and be able to plan a smarter way to produce more of the items in list two.

Whilst this is nothing radical it should help us by making people step back to see the big picture and allow us to move forward in one direction. Once this phase of the content audit is complete, the next stage, planning how to fill some of the “would like to have” gaps, will begin and once we start producing this content, regular catchups will help keep everyone up-to-speed and make sure we all focussed towards the same goals.

The tricky bit will be populating the second list. Asking your audience or colleagues for input will lead to one thing, a very big long list of “hey, do you know what would be REALLY good…” style requests. I’m more than happy to field those and they are, for the most part, good to have noted down.

Where it starts to get tricky is in the prioritisation of these things, and for that you’ll need to get some of the interested parties together to help. I’ve already covered how I do that but to make that process a bit slicker (it’s very ad-hoc at the moment) I’ll be setting up a common “Information Planning” meeting. That way we can involve the pertinent stakeholders in the decision process, and it will help communicate the ongoing plans around the Information Strategy.

Towards the end of last year I started to see how several related, but disparate, strands of work would start to come together. The information produced by my team, the training collateral, the partner focussed material, is all focussed on the product and this coming week will see the first step towards the realisation of all that hard work coming together into a cohesive story.

The final push comes in the form of a content audit, which will allow me to see where the gaps are, and where rework is required, to complete all the ’stories’ that run from the main product messaging, down through our information strategy pyramid.

At present we have successfully moved to a single source/content re-use system which allows us to publish content to a knowledge centre hosted on our developer community website, that content is also used by the sales/pre-sales department who receive it in a different format.

The developer community website will be used by partners to both learn and keep up to date with product developments, and reduce the burden on our Support team (something that is already happening with call numbers going down since we introduced our new knowledge centre). The website also means we can look at producing our forms of content for information delivery, videos, screencams, example tutorials and such like.

This is an area where the training team and publications team will come together and which the content audit will help drive.

On a personal note it’s nice to be on the final straight of some ideas I’ve had brewing for a couple of years now. I’ve been lucky that I work with a team of guys who I trust completely to do a good job and who’ve never let me down regardless of the challenge.

It’s going to be an exciting few months, with much to learn and many hurdles to be overcome but once complete I think we will have an excellent, information focussed culture throughout the company.

Buy-in for the information strategy will be re-enforced by the content audit as I’ll need to talk to everyone who could/should be involved, but it is noticeable that there has been a shift in understanding throughout our company with the realisation that information will play a larger and larger role in driving us forward.

I was recently asked to write an article about blogging for inclusion in a piece focussed on social media and how it will both challenge and change our profession as a whole and the more I wrote the more it helped me sort out my own thoughts on the matter.

One thing I’ve realised is that even if you don’t think social media will impact your own professional circumstances, I have no doubts that it will change the way our profession is perceived.

I’ve also come to realise that I’ve done a fair bit of talking about a lot of this stuff, yet continue to be stalled on actually doing it. So, with a new year stretching ahead of me I guess it’s time to put up or shut up.

As I have control of our developer community website the most obvious place to start is with a blog. Using the blog to publish short articles, and allowing people to comment on them seems to be a straightforward approach and with some encouragement I know some of the developers will contribute short articles as well.

The challenge will come in how we seed the community. At present it’s telling that with a little bit of PR, the number of people visiting the community website rises, so for now I’ll continue with the old school methods to drive traffic to the website (mainly through ‘update’ emails). Hopefully, if we provide enough interaction opportunities on the website, that need will drop away and the community well start to sustain itself.

Social media is a strange beast at times. There is always a lot of noise at first and, when it dies away it can seem like there isn’t much substance left. However, the people who are succeeding at using social media services, the people at the cutting edge of such things, the people who adopt new ideas and technology and are ready and willing to try them out to see if they work, are finding that there is a much richer set of capabilities than may be obvious, and the real value in your use of social media isn’t the technology but the people who use it, the community.

Your circumstances may mean that, for reasons outwith your control, social media just cannot be considered. However for everyone else, surely it’s time you took a step back and thought about the information you produce, the community of people who use it, and how best to meet their needs.

Maybe it’s time to make some brave choices.

And if you’ve come this far it’s about now that the reality of social media hits home.

You see for all the strengths and possibilities that the myriad of social media services offer, the one thing that no-one else can tell you is what choice to make. The direction you take depends on too many variables that only you know but, at this point, there is only one thing worse than making the wrong decision.

Not making a decision at all.

The information platform is changing, it is evolving and will continually evolve over the coming few years. You can’t afford to wait until the evolution is finished, you need to jump aboard now. You’ll need to learn fast, figure things out as you go, plan as best you can, and concede defeat at times but if you don’t then you’ll be left where you are now.

Except it’ll be 3 years further down the line and the rest of the world will have moved on.