What do you call your documents? What is the first thing you do when you start writing? What is the last?

All these things that you do without thinking about, the basic automation that your brain easily handles, over and over again, these things are, to you, so basic as to be forgettable. You don’t tell anyone else to do them (they must know, right?) and you probably don’t remember where you learned how to do them.

You bulid your own mental checklist and that takes care of that.

Need to provide a PDF of a document for someone? No problem, generate it this way, name it in this manner to keep it sensible and consistent and put it THERE (as you know everyone has access to it that way). And so on and so forth. All these things locked away in your head.

That mental checklist is made up of many things, from coping other people, reading books, and learned from mistakes. Without it you’d be lost, and with it you retain value as you are the person who knows how to do those things.

But that also means you are the bottleneck, the only person who knows X and Y, and can help with Z.

Better to share that information, let others learn and improve it (and they will). It allows them to do more, and lets you do other things. More power to the team, and a better service to the rest of the company, further cementing the value you bring to your organisation.

Over the past couple of years my job has changed. I have the same title and job description as I did before but the structure of my day is dramatically different.

I certainly don’t do much writing any more, other than the odd page or two here and there. Instead I find myself discussing strategies, planning phases of work, and generally communicating with other parts of the company as best I can.

I’m also permanently interruptable.

Part of my responsibilities is as line manager to a small group of people within the R&D team. Obviously the team of technical writers forms part of that, and there are also some developers in there as well. I’m not involved as a day to day manager, instead I’m there for what I guess most people would call the ‘HR’ side of things, including organising appraisals and, where needed, some coaching.

So between those responsibilities, and my own work I tend to spend most of my week talking to people. Either in meetings, or for a quick update on things and despite having my own set of priorities I am more than happy to be interrupted.

A long time ago, when I took my first role as a team leader, I was given some advice that has stuck with me, namely that my main role was to help everyone else in the team do their job to the best of their abilities. That means removing obstacles, dealing with problems and generally making sure that all they need to worry about is their work.

I’m permanently interruptable because that’s my job.

It took me quite a while to realise this, and getting yourself into a position to be interruptable isn’t all that easy. You need a good team around you (which I have) and you need to trust them and delegate to them as much as you can (I trust them, and I’m working on that delegation thing!).

There is always the thought, when you are new to being a manager, of ‘dumping’ on people when you delegate work or ownership of something but I’ve seen that the opposite is true. Most professionals enjoy being challenged, and giving them responsibility is a direct indication of how much you trust them. Yes they might have to step their game up, but that’s all part and parcel of that thing they call a career.

Are you interruptable? Should you be?

Scott Nesbitt over at DMN Communications recently posted about mentoring and yes, I am quite flattered that I am mentioned…

I have been a team lead/manager at three different companies, cutting my teeth the first time as the youngest and most inexperienced member of the team at Dr. Solomon’s (the anti-virus people, bought by McAfee) standing in for a couple of months whilst a new department head was hired. Needless to say I didn’t do much mentoring there, as I was still largely learning my trade.

The second position was my best learning experience, with a small company that went through a couple of boom/bust cycles. I learnt a lot about myself, the role of technical communications within a software company and as I was hiring and building a team I spent a fair amount of time mentoring some of the technical writers I worked with.

But not all of them.

I’ve never been afraid of hiring someone with more experience, better knowledge or better skillset. Part of that is acknowledging my own weaknesses, and partly it is knowing that a good team requires the right people with a good range of complementary skills.

That said, I have worked with a few less experience technical writers and I do enjoy that process and the challenges it can bring. As I’ve recently been trying to allude, the considerations our profession requires can quite perplexing, and it’s good to talk through such things as, frequently, I too will learn something from those discussions.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think that being a good mentor is as much about listening and learning as it is about guiding and teaching. I should really run this past my parents as they are both teachers and I’m sure will have a view on this kind of thing.

Today though, the role of mentor is fulfilled in a different way. We all have access (limited or otherwise) to some very very smart people in our industry, and whilst I do bemoan the noise on such places as TechWR, it’s true to say that I’ve learned a lot about what I do (and why I do it) from some of the people on that mailing list.

With that in mind it seems to me that the wisdom of the crowd is the new mentor, and that the next time someone asks us why we bother with blogs, twitter, mailing lists and so on, that that is the answer we give.

After all, everyone needs a mentor.

The last week or so I’ve been pulling together a strategy presentation.

Backwards.

It all started when I realised that I need a place to dump some thoughts and concepts, things I knew were related but didn’t know how or why. Most of these were simple diagrams, or short sentences. I’m not sure why I choose powerpoint, I guess I knew that at some point I’d need to present these ideas as a cohesive whole.

So without planning it I soon had a batch of somewhat related slides, but which had no audience and certainly no idea of structure or story.

The slides include diagrams of how we are planning on storing our content once we have chunked it all into topics, quotes around the changing role information is playing in the workplace and as part of the product set, details of our current build system and how it needs to improve, lists of metadata, analyst suggestions with implementation ideas of how we can put them into action, thoughts on the change of writing style required to move to topic-based authoring, and so on and so forth.

It’s a big grab bag of everything and anything that we’ve thought about, or will need to consider as we change both how we work, and what we do for the company. I’m pretty confident it will be something we can re-use over and over again, shuffling the slides in and out depending on the audience, and I’m certain it will prove worthwhile both internally and externally.

Mind you I’ve just realised that there is one word that doesn’t feature as strongly as it should. Conversation. That will come as soon as I start to add in some thoughts around the developer community website I’m currently building (which in turn has reminded me to beef up the training material angle.. ack!).

What’s really encouraging is that, despite the unconventional approach it’s all starting to make some sense as a cohesive whole, and I think the range of information it covers will help us focus in on various things we’ve not fully considered (or considered at all) and once we’ve done that it will only take a bit of slimming down to be ideal for communicating our plans to the rest of the company.

Typically when thinking of planning I start to think in more traditional terms, breaking down the work needed into actionable chunks. However this time I let my mind race and wander across all the myriad of topics that it needed to consider, captured as much information as I could and it’s only now that I’m starting to step back and survey what I’ve created.

As a process it’s a bit ramshackle but sometimes it’s good to step off the well-worn path and try something new. So next time you are considering future plans and strategies, why not start them backwards?