(note to self: stop with the jokey bad grammar, peoples might think you cant be writing good)

I’ll say this quietly because I’m a little apprehensive but, for the next few months, it looks like we will have extra resource in our team. Basically we are ahead of the curve when it comes to recruiting so, until the rest of the R&D team catches up, we are one technical writer up!

Which means that we are taking the opportunity to both get ahead with some things, and catch up on others, and one of the things we’ve never tried here is to have a formal editoral review of the content. Peer review is one thing and whilst the technical content we produce is excellent, the differing writing styles and approaches each writer has does show through.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not all that bothered by this, simple business reasoning dictated that we concentrate on improving the accuracy and timeliness of the documentation and so, now we have done that, we can turn our attentions to other areas including findability and clarity.

The latter finds me taking on the role of Editor (I want to write Editor-in-chief just to conjure up images of a smoke filled newspaper office in the 50s), casting an eye over all of the content we produce and using our lightweight Writing Style Guide to prod and cajole the content towards something that, without being too restrictive, has a level of consistency for the reader.

As we haven’t had anyone performing that role before, it’s taking a bit of adjustment and the jokes about the “red pen” are already flying. Thankfully I work with smart people and it’s not taken long to see the results come to fruition.

What we need to figure out is how we change this model in the future so that we can all consistently edit each other’s work, lest I become a bottleneck in this process.

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.

We all have a need to make sure we are working on the most important thing, the thing that needs our attention and focus the most. Given that all of us will have more than one thing that needs to get done, you need to prioritise.

But how?

Ivan Walsh recently posted his thoughts on this topic but he doesn’t cover the process that comes before the daily decision making of “what shall I do today?”.

Presuming that you don’t lurch from day to day and that you have a plan, or at least a list of things that you need to deliver, how do you go about setting the priority?

Some people will be lucky to have a direct customer who knows exactly what they want, you can work with them around any constraints of time and budget (resource) to prioritise the work that needs done.

But what if you have two customers, or three, or seven?

Well that’s close to the situation I’m in and my solution is quite simple.

Let them decide.

A few months back I started to jot down, in a spreadsheet, everything that my team COULD do. It includes some items like scouring our Wiki for any useful information that we can use, as well as “hey you know what would be really great..” requests we get which aren’t urgent but which I didn’t want to lose.

I soon realised I might as well track every information request there and very soon after that I realised that I needed a way to sort the list and make sure we were working on the right thing, at the right time.

Given that many items on that list were ‘put’ there by other people, I realised that if we estimated (very roughly) how much effort each would take, we would be able to bargain with people and, ultimately if two requests are in conflict then, hey, I can get the people who requested them to discuss the reasons and let them decide.

So we now have a big list of work items, each estimated, each prioritised (we are using MoSCoW) and which I can use to drive discussions when the next “must have, immediately” request lands in my inbox.

Ultimately, our customers decide what we work on and as I can give them a full picture of what, and why, it’s much easier for them to understand those times when they don’t get what they want. Having that information to hand makes the act of getting real priorities much easier.

My response, via Twitter, to Ivan’s post was this: “I tend to let other people set the priorities for my work. That way they all have (to have) a view of it.”

How do you set your priorities?

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.

What a wonderful group of people you are, my dear readers and fellow Twitterers. I asked for some suggestions as I’m pulling together a short, internal, workshop covering some simple techniques and tips for the “non-writers” in our organisation.

I received some great suggestions and a couple of excellent links and, as promised, here is a generic version of the presentation.

The one I’ll run internally has some examples that are specific to the audience and our organisation, so I’d suggest if you are going to use the presentation I’ve provided, that you add in your own examples. Much easier for people to understand if they see real examples in action.

How do you get started? Faced with that pristine new document, all that whitespace, what do you generally do to start writing that document?

Like most companies, we have a number of people who create content in a number of different styles and formats. The main producers are, of course, the technical writing team, but after that there is still a fair number of documents which fall into the “creative writing” bag including whitepapers, proposals, product sheets and so on.

The people involved in writing these documents are, for the most part, promoted internally and have had no formal training in how to write. I was chatting with one of them recently and he said that the biggest issue he had was just getting started, and once started he couldn’t really tell if what he was writing was particularly well structured.

“Hey” he said, “could you train us to be writers?”

One day I’ll learn not to say YES to such questions, but it seemed a reasonable request at the time.

The thing is, I’ve never been trained as a writer either, and writing technical documentation follows patterns which other types of document don’t necessarily follow. On the other hand, any pattern is better than no pattern and if I could introduce some basic methodologies, surely it’s better for everyone?

Luckily for me I had still had fresh memories of attending a particular session at the Technical Communication conference. Kim Schrantz-Berquist presented If you can write an article, you can write anything! in which she covered a couple of writing techniques which I think will be perfect to introduce to the ‘creative writers’ in our company.

The first one I’ve adapted quite a bit to better fit with the intended audience, but the principles of the 5Ws and 1H remain the same. If you cover Who, What, Why, When, Where and How you won’t missing anything, and it’s a good way to kick start the brain, and get past that first blank page.

Kim also covered the Inverted Pyramid, something more typically used in journalism, that loads all the important information at the top of the article, ideal for business writing as it allows people to ‘get out’ of the document without missing out on crucial information.

I’ve taken the techniques she covered, crafted some examples specific to our organisation, and a little bit about Active vs Passive, a few slides on grammar that build on advice from Prof. Pullum (basically, don’t sweat it and write as you would speak) and will hopefully deliver the first workshop next week.

But before I do that, I’d love to hear if you have any other techniques that could help.

Better documentation lowers support calls, is a widely held assumption and one I’m hoping to prove in the coming months. With our new knowledge centre in place, and Google Analytics tracking how many people are visiting it, I’ll soon have stats for my side of the fence.

Early numbers (from the past two weeks) show that more people are looking at the Documentation area of our website than are looking at the Support area, but then the knowledge centre (part of the Documentation area) is new so that’s only to be expected and I’m really not expecting to get a true picture of how things are going until late January next year.

Fingers crossed.

With thanks to Rachel Potts for her post on what web analytics can do for technical communications.