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.

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?

There is one thing I haven’t done here for quite a while. It’s rather remiss of me so please accept my apologies.

Quite simply, I wanted to say thank you. To you. Yes YOU.

Thank you for visiting this blog, and more importantly, thank you for coming back and visiting again. A lot of the ideas I talk about here are made better by your comments, and I continue to find blogging to be a useful way to work through some of the thoughts and random ponderings that float around in my head.

I tend, like many, to do most of my blog reading through RSS and I know that making the effort to comment on a blog is something that not everyone will do, and which some blogs can struggle with. It continues to amaze and delight me that anyone reads this blog, let alone takes the time to share their own hard-earned thoughts.

So, sincerely, thank you.

(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.

I’m sorry, dear reader, truly I am. I feel bad, very bad indeed, guilty even. It’s not you though, it’s me, honestly. You are lovely, it’s just… well I wanted something different…

So I am writing blog posts elsewhere. Blog posts you might be interested in… I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but it’s just not that easy to bring up in conversation, you know?

Please don’t judge me, I will write for you again soon.

Ohhh, you want to see what I’ve been writing? Hmmm are you sure? Well, ok, but only because you asked so nicely.

The next ISTC technical communicators’ meeting in Glasgow will take place on Thursday 26th August 2010, from 7.30 pm onwards. Come along to talk about latest news and trends in communication, or just to meet other communication professionals.

The event is free and open to anyone interested in technical communication, such as technical authors, information architects, internal communication prodessionals, 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[at]istc.org.uk.

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.