Articles on Technical Writing, Management and Hiring

The Art of Self Marketing
by Kerri Harris
Savvy career-minded professionals should consider incorporating these marketing techniques into their annual objectives.

Authoring in XML — Why Start?
by Barbara Stuhlemmer
Technical communications professionals had been talking about authoring in XML for a very long time. At first, it seemed like a lot of hype, but that has changed.

Avoid the SOX documentation nightmare with these 5 tips
by Vin D’Amico
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act has been called the most comprehensive reform of corporate law since the Securities Exchange Act was passed in 1934. The effects of SOX are far reaching. Here are 5 tips for SOX documentation to keep your projects on track. Published in ITWorld Canada.

Calculating the Financial Impact of DITA for Translation
by Amber Swope
Success in a global marketplace requires translating content into multiple languages. Moving to a topic-based XML architecture, such as the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), can help you control the translation process and save money.

Common Myths and Misconceptions About Layoffs
by Kerri Barber
At the end of each year, corporate leaders look warily toward what is often a bleak and uncertain while making adjustments to already modest budgets. All too many prepare to reduce headcount through layoffs and mandatory retirement programs. Why those actions don’t bode well for long-term strategy.

Communicating for Diversity
by Kerri Harris
Effective communication is a manager’s greatest tool in rallying groups toward a common cause. From the annual department address to daily email, even the most engaging statements lose meaning when barriers to effective communication foster misconception and confusion.

Considerations for Hiring Technical Writers
by Philip Rastocny
Many times, hiring situations provide opportunities to expand your group in more than one way. Finding the right technical writer candidates can be burdensome, but with a clear goal fixed in your memory and renewed each day, your up-stream paddling toil can easily become a down-stream paddling pleasure.

Dealing With Professional Burnout
by Whitney Potsus
Professional burnout can strike anyone regardless of their profession – tech writer, instructional designer, editor, butcher, baker, candlestick maker – but it’s not always easy to detect until the damage has been done. This article looks at the signs of professional burnout and dealing with them head on.

Demand for Specialized Staffing Companies Helps Writing Assistance Stomp First Quarter Goals with a 70 Percent Increase in Revenue over Last Year
A look back at how Writing Assistance, Inc. the national leader in contract technical writing, increased its revenues by 70 percent over the same quarter the year before. Published in the Industrial Manufacturing News.,/p>

Eliminating the END GAME from Electronic Deliverables
by Alan J. Porter
While executive management may sometimes believe that anyone can write and that a technical writer’s job is to ‘Just Publish It’, technical writers need to look at what they can do to improve the ‘end game’ process.

Five Questions to Ask Yourself While Creating a New Documentation Department
by Eric Butow
Congratulations! You’re the manager of your company’s emerging documentation department — and your work has just begun. To create effective documentation for your customers, you not only have to build a sound team, but also build working relationships with all other departments in your company.

Five Secrets to Successful Interviewing and Hiring
by Karen O’Keefe
This article covers five key activities, including: writing a detailed job description; making sure the setting/environment is conducive; conducting a programmed interview; using multiple interviewers; and considering testing.

Fundamentals of Leadership: Communicating a Vision
by Kerri Harris
Today’s business climate of outsourcing, in-sourcing, virtual teams, and ROI-driven objectives can leave a manager at any level feeling powerless. Yet, we often see examples of those who can elicit unwavering support from their teams, driving highly effective projects, and getting the best performance from employees despite ever-increasing workloads.

Hiring Contract Technical Writers
by Scott Hartmann
So you’ve got approval to hire a contract technical writer. Maybe it’s for overflow work or a special project. Nevertheless, it is your responsibility and you want to do it right.

How Important is Specific Software Experience?
by WAI Editor
Being a technical writer requires an individual to have a variety of skills, not the least of which is a strong sense of communicating to a target audience. However, many a technical writer has been passed over for employment because the tech writer lacked experience with a specific piece of software – such as Adobe’s Framemaker. Unfortunately, this can extend so far as insisting on experience with a specific version of the software or else an otherwise stellar candidate can be vetted out of the hiring process very quickly.

How Technical Writers Add Value to a Team
by WAI Editor
Technical writers are not just writers, although that is certainly a major aspect of their duties. They are also user advocates, researchers, testers and publishers. All tasks that are, in the end, performed to enhance the usability and value of your products or services.

How to Justify Conference Attendance
by Mike Doyle
Professional conferences can be expensive and not all budget managers understand their importance or the benefits derived by conference attendees. Mike Doyle includes some handy worksheets you can use.

How to Justify Hiring Technical Writers During Hard Economic Times
by Aparna Datta
Of course, today’s technical writers not only write, they also perform many other tasks: programming, web development, training, and so on. Add to that the fact that many are also highly trained and certified in other areas besides writing.

How to Market a Documentation Department
by Robert King
When you first ventured into the tech writing ranks, marketing the department was likely the furthest thing from your mind. You already had work to do, so marketing was somebody else’s job.

It’s In the Numbers: Using Metrics to Plan Documentation Projects
by Margie Yundt and Sherry McMenemy
It’s in the numbers. Creating documentation is not an exact science, yet as communication leaders, we are expected to provide real estimates for how much time we need to document a project, or what we can produce given a pre-determined timeline.

Making the Transition From Techcom to Marcom
by Christy Simard
At first glance, technical communication (techcom) and technical marketing communication (marcom) appear to be very different genres. Where traditional techcom strives to help people use products, marcom seeks to make people realize they need products. This article looks at the differences and similarities between these two types of communication specialty areas.

Making the Transition from Technical Writer to Manager
by Steve Capri
This article is a collage of ideas and experiences from some people who’ve made the leap from writer to manager. Although it’s not a step-by-step guideline, it provides some compelling insight as to what individuals might expect as they transition into the management ranks. Even if you are an experienced manager, you might find these ideas helpful.

Managing Conflict
by Kerri Harris
Conflict is characteristic in any situation that brings diverse groups together to manage tasks and obstacles. Conflict resolution is among the many tasks delegated to managers, yet it is often the most difficult to master.

Managing Documentation Teams with Varied Schedules and Locations
by Brett Peruzzi
In many of today’s corporate work environments, the days of managing a group of people who all share a common physical location and the same work hours are waning. More often, work teams may be composed of people who work in either a company office or from home, in different cities, states, time zones, and countries.

Managing SMEs – Part 1: A Primer for Success
by Philip Rastocny
Just the thought of dealing with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) can create stress in the life of any documentation manager. Philip Rastocny provides in-depth insight on how best to deal with SMEs.

Managing SMEs – Part 2: Selling the Concept to Management
by Philip Rastocny
Part 2 switches the focus to members of your management team and what you can do to sell your team’s professionalism. Also included are hints on how your writers can individually sell themselves to gain cooperation from SMEs.

Negotiation Techniques
by Kerri Harris
Most of us are involved in negotiating in some form or other on a daily basis. Here is a look at the process of negotiation and tips you can use to improve your technique as you progress through the process.

Paradigm Shifts are Never Pretty: Advice on Making the Move to XML Authoring
>by Sarah O’Keefe
Most people are risk-averse, and profound changes such as the move to structured authoring require new skills and workflows. To ensure a successful transition, XML implementers need to assess their team members, identify allies, and build their implementation strategy around the staff members who embrace change.

Potential Position Descriptions for Information Engineering Professionals
by Steve Capri
This article defines the tasks and responsibilities for up to seven levels of information engineers, plus two levels of management, because the author found that many companies do not provide formal position descriptions for their technical writers and other communication specialists.

Proving Worth: What Technical Communication Managers Must Do to Prove the Value of Their Deliverables
by Hannah Kirk
Technical communication managers are often required to prove the worth of their deliverables over and over again. The trick to increasing value with internal and external users is to identify areas where documentation can save time and money, to create agreement that the documentation can save time and money, and to ensure that the documentation does save time and money. Find out how.

Putting it All Together
by Pat Grabill
Here’s the scenario: You are a techcom manager who has just been informed by the boss that, due to budget constrictions, one department of the company will be shut down and its remaining employees transferred to your department. Those transferees might be engineers or software developers joining a group of writers—or vice-versa. Your assignment is to assist with the transition so it appears seamless.

Raising Your Documentation Team’s Visibility
by Whitney Potsus
Whether the documentation department has a staff of one or a team of 12, visibility within the company is a frequent concern. The reasons for this concern range from personal to professional. You want to be remembered when promotions and bonuses are handed out. Here’s how.

Saving Money with Virtual Teams and Working at a Distance Without Travel
by Barbara Stuhlemmer
Telecommuters are becoming a larger part of a company’s human resource equation. Also, there is an increasing trend to outsource parts of projects. To ensure the consistency and quality of any product or deliverable, it is imperative that teams are able to communicate throughout a project – tough enough to do when everyone is in one place, but even more challenging when team members may be thousands of miles apart.

Streamlining the Phases of Disaster Recovery
by Vin D’Amico
All too often, companies either rely upon personal knowledge and skill to recover from emergency situations, or they write a multi-volume encyclopedia of recovery procedures. When disaster strikes, neither approach lends itself to rapid response. Published in Accounting Today.

Starting a Technical Writing Business from Scratch
by Ruth Nickolich
What does it take to start your own technical-writing business? Chutzpa! Insanity! Here’s some insight from someone who has done just that.

Technical Writers are Communicators
by WAI Editor
Before the emergence of the personal computer, primary technical writer deliverables were operating manuals and instructional guides prepared for print publication. However, an argument can easily be made that even in pre-PC times technical writers were still more than writers – they were communicators.

Technical Writers as Subject Matter Experts
by WAI Editor
Many firms who seek outsourced technical writing help to complete their projects only have the expectation that the technical writer they bring on board will become knowledgeable enough to be able to communicate to the firms’ customers and do an adequate job to get the material out the door. Instead, firms would benefit from viewing technical writers they hire as potential subject matter experts that they’ll use on a regular basis so that the technical writers working for them will become increasingly knowledgeable about the company, its customers, its products and the audience for what’s being documented.

Test Driving Your Next Employee’s Skills
by Daniel Rieger
For the past few years, the buzz phrase in interviewing has been behavioral interviews. In behavioral interviews, the interviewer asks the candidate what has been done in the past in order to extrapolate what will be done into the future: past performance indicates future performance. How to ‘test drive’ a new employee and why it matters.

The First Line of Support
by Eric Butow
You may have had this conversation with your software development team once or a hundred times before: “We need documentation for our software so our users will know how to use it.” Published in Software Development (SD) Times.

The Life of a Lone Writer
by Whitney Potsus
‘Lone writers’ — those who work as their employer’s only staff writers — are a different breed, with their own unique set of professional and personal challenges. At the same time a blessing and a curse, the lone writer life offers flexibility, variety, and autonomy, along with feelings of stress, isolation, and burnout. Here are some first-hand insights from a lone writer.

The Why and How of Content Convergence and Integration
by Rahel Anne Bailie
Industry is discovering content as a commodity; the rules are changing, and fast. What have traditionally been seen as the lowliest form of commercial content within an enterprise – technical manuals – are starting to take their place alongside the other valued corporate assets.

The Write Man For The Job: Tech Writing Firm Writing Assistance Inc. Grew On Dot-Com Bust
by Jordan Stalker
As the dot-com bubble began to deflate at the end of 2000, Scott Hartmann saw an opportunity for his then recently acquired writing business. Published in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.

Think Globally, Write Locally
by Kristen Giovanis
Companies operating in a global marketplace know they need to translate documents for their audiences. But some documents need more than translation: they need localization. Although a document’s words can be translated perfectly, the document can still be ineffective in another market, due to differences in the way local businesses operate and in the way people think.

Top 10 Interview Tips
by Karen O’Keefe
As an interviewee, these actions might give you a competitive edge. As an interviewer, they might help set your standards on how you rate potential candidates.

Topic-Based Writing to the Rescue: Project Considerations for Managers (Case Study)
by Rahel Anne Bailie
What do you do when someone asks you to help with a ‘rescue’ project that requires a number of deliverables, including training materials and user guides for a new enterprise system, in under eight weeks? Here’s a case study that details how just such a project can be successful.

Training Technical Communicators for Management
by Jessica Erber-Stark
Identifying management candidates and training technical communicators before they get promoted to management positions can make for a very smooth and successful transition for both the candidate and the organization.

Turning Web 2.0 Into Business as Usual
by Kerri Harris
Web 2.0 is hip, trendy, and reminiscent of catch-phrases from the Dot-com boom when just about anything related to binary was so ‘Now.’ How Web 2.0 is merely a tag used to convey the generalized concept that collaboration is changing.

Understanding the Need for Content Quality Management
by Diane Wieland
An interview with Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, that’s both a bit controversial and inspiring in that it looks at how good content quality management can be a great benefit for tech pubs departments.

Wearer of Many Hats: One Management Style Does Not Fit All
by Jeffrey Young
Trying to convince multiple individuals to head in the same direction requires figuring out their mindsets and what it takes to motivate them. This article discusses four ‘hats’ managers may have to wear and which management ‘hat’ works best for each situation.

Which Skill Sets are Important for a Technical Writer?
by WAI Editor
Like any profession, becoming a technical writer requires a mastery of a certain set of skills. This skill set used to involve primarily writing and illustration skills, as large manuals for print publication were the standard in the profession. The worlds of communications and technology have evolved dramatically in the latter part of the 20th century and the early part of this century. How has that evolution affected the skill set required for a technical writer?

Who Says You Can’t Use Microsoft Word To Do XML?
by Scott Abel
In this article, Scott Abel looks at using MS Word for XML and takes a closer look at one alternative XML solution from a Microsoft partner that uses Word’s familiar interface.

Why Technical Publishing Shouldn’t Be Art
by Alan J. Porter
Give a canvas and a box of watercolors to a landscape painter and a second-grader. The same materials, the same process, but you get very different results. “Writing is a solitary occupation. Publication is a group exercise,” stated novelist Madeline. Why she’s correct.

XML Authoring: Coming to a Desktop Near You
by Scott Abel
This article looks at the many benefits of XML authoring and the trend that’s moving technical publications toward structured content.