A Little Thing Called Documentation Sprawl
The software applications I’ve worked on for the last five years have been part of an effort to replace old desktop applications largely with Web-based applications with a central database. These new...
View Article22 Questions Technical Writers Should Ask When Starting a Software...
Having worked on a number of software projects over the last few years, I’ve put together the following list of questions the technical communicator should ask when starting a software project. There’s...
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Why a User Education Plan Will Make Project Managers Love You
One of my fellow members of the Intermountain Chapter of STC is a major proponent of tech writers having project management skills. Planning is one of these skills. I’ve thought for years that I’m not...
View ArticleInformation Growth: Organic vs. Organized
Recently, I had some technical problems with this blog that seemed to result from a category excluder plugin. Somehow I ended up with a bunch of duplicated categories with one post assigned to each...
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The Worst Shortcut a Communicator Can Take
When deadlines are hurtling toward you with all the leniency of a runaway dump truck and you realize that you have to sacrifice something in your user education project, what do you choose to drop?...
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Project Pinnacle, Episode 1: Conversation with the Project Manager
I just started on a new project this month. Taking the lead from Karen Mulholland‘s reporting on her Tribal Knowledge Project, I’m going to blog about how it goes. In order to protect the innocent, or...
View ArticleProject Pinnacle, Episode 2: Drafting Quick Reference Guides
In my initial conversation with the manager of Project Pinnacle, we decided on a set of role-based quick reference guides as the documentation for the application. I ended up with about five weeks to...
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