Agile development and tech pubs
I’m finally following up on the Agile tech pubs webinar hosted by CIDM and presented by Bill Gearhart and Mike Wethington on May 14th (nearly a month after the fact, but better than never!). Mike and Bill were also kind enough to answer some follow-up questions for me, and those answers and insights are reflected in this post as well.
For those of us working in software development, I think it makes a lot of sense to learn about the Agile development methodology. Many development teams want to move toward Agile; if/when an Agile initiative surfaces in your org, advance knowledge of Agile methods will make it possible for tech writers to ‘hit the ground running’, adapt, and even capitalize on new opportunities created by Agile adoption.
Tech pubs groups that are seeking to innovate and expand the channels in which they publish and exchange information (wikis, forums, blogs, etc.) and the roles that they fill (content aggregators, knowledge managers, community facilitators, etc.) should probably consider how Agile adoption on the content development side would affect their efforts. Imagine the credibility boost that tech pubs groups can get from being recognized as Agile leaders within their depts.
My personal opinion is that within organizations that value innovation, tech pubs groups that take the initiative to understand how they can function in, and contribute to, Agile development will at the very least score important PR points. Additionally, key aspects of Agile methodology, for example, the emphasis on openness and transparency and the focus on doing ‘just-enough’ for each cycle, provide rationales for new approaches to developing and publishing content, and for engaging more directly with internal and external stakeholders. Working through the ’story’ approach to adding features is also a potential boon to tech pubs groups, since it provides a direct mechanism for writers to leverage their engagement efforts and show direct ROI for their projects.
As the seminar pointed out, Agile is not magic, nor is it a panacea. The process of moving to Agile takes time and concerted effort, and there will be many problems to work through and mistakes along the way. For tech pubs groups, getting familiar with Agile methods in advance of a larger initiative within the the dev org is a worthwhile investment in internal relations. Further, tech pubs groups can use Agile’s focus on small, discrete deliverables and open communication to enhance their ROI by delivering the items that the product team has decided up front are the highest priority. And at the higher level, tech pubs groups can use their expertise in the emerging tech pubs channels and roles that I describe to position themselves as highly valued contributors to the development, prioritization, and execution of user assistance and community stories within the Agile development process.
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Three mini-posts
A few interesting tech pubs-related events for me this week:
- a terrific case study webinar on doing tech pubs within an Agile development model, hosted by CIDM and presented by Bill Gearhart and Mike Wethington
- a LinkedIn discussion I started on the topic of socializing technical content that fizzled, which was illuminating in its own way
- an article by Joel Spolsky on ReadWriteWeb here, which prompted me to visit Stack Overflow for the first time in awhile to see how the site is developing
Tech Pubs and Agile Development – Agile development is a big, hot, topic these days; and if you write for a young company, your development peers are probably wanting to use some form of Agile methodology. If you work for an older, larger company, it’s only a matter of time before Agile pilot projects start spinning off. If no one in your company is talking about Agile, you still owe it to yourself to learn about this methodology, and if you think it can work better than what you are doing now, you can even implement it independently within tech pubs and start evangelizing to development. Imagine that. I’ll devote an entire post to the webinar and the implications of Agile for tech pubs within the next few days.
LinkedIn Discussion; Do you socialize technical content? – I posted this because I read and contributed to a discussion in this same group about where tech writer jobs have gone. That discussion now has well over 120 comments, many of which made me cringe – there are too many tech writers stuck in a victim-hood mentality, willing to use a lot of energy venting and bemoaning their fate. I wondered how the same population would respond to a suggestion that involves adapting to new environments, namely the popularity of social media, and exploring how that might impact their profession… That discussion has 11 comments, 1.5 are jokes, one misunderstands the question, and I think 4 are my responses… Should I be discouraged?
Stack Overflow - If you haven’t visited, do so. Unless you are a developer, you won’t find much there to engage with (although I did stumble across a discussion of LaTex (!), which I hadn’t thought much about in years, and which I didn’t realize still has currency – have to look into why that is…). Anyway, Stack Overflow is a programming question and answer site, and it’s working pretty well. I think tech writers should look at it and think: ok, how can we build a channel like this into our doc site? If you publish topic-oriented content to a web site, imagine a mini Stack Overflow that ties into your content, and that is owned and operated by Tech Pubs. Yes, that means getting the resources to create and manage sophisticated web applications, and somebody will have to pay for it. Tech pubs people should be talking together to help each other understand and meet these kinds of challenges, not expending energy on nostalgia for the past, resentment of the present, and fear of the future.
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Renewed respect
I’ve been away for awhile, and I’m back with no excuses or rationalizations. I didn’t lose interest in my chosen subject, but I did, I’m afraid, lose interest in the actual work of writing the blog. Not that it’s all that difficult to write, and as my own blog-boss, I’m not that hard to please… I just got to a point where I wasn’t sure if what I was doing was worthwhile, and so became less and less motivated. And of course, once you let a practice (which writing, even blogging, should be) lapse, it just gets more difficult to resume as time goes by.
Now, to address the title of the post, what I have been doing lately is writing for hire – consulting as a technical writer and marketing writer. (I’ve been doing other things as well, working on an exciting project which I’ll write more about in the near future…)
So, as the title states, I have renewed respect for the act and the profession of writing. I’m surprised to find that during the years I spent in management, even though I was as close to writers as I could be without doing the actual work, I still managed to become somewhat alienated from, and lost some respect for, the demands of the profession. After all, when you only look at finished work, it’s difficult to bear in mind the painstaking planning and research, the careful drafting, editing, and revision, the tedious organizing and housekeeping, the last-minute accommodations and additions, etc. that are typical of most writing projects.
Now that I’m back in the authoring business, all the impediments to good writing that had receded from my consciousness during my management tenure have re-surfaced; not much has changed in the dynamic between the writer and the other stakeholders in the process, or between the writer I strive to be and my own shortcomings. So, since this blog’s purpose is to in some way improve the situation of technical writing as a discipline and profession, and since writing is a practice that I want to stay fit for, I think I’ll take up this blog again, with a renewed respect for my fellow writers…
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So when JM and I talked about the changing landscape for tech pubs, the internal and external drivers that surfaced in our conversation, namely; reduced demand for traditional ‘book’ format and formal deliverables, increasing emphasis on speed, a growing number of content sources and channels through which audiences want to access knowledge, increased opportunities for granular content reuse, globalization and localization requirements, and contractual and compliance issues, indicated opportunities to expand the traditional tech writer role.
Many tech writers wear multiple hats these days, for example by specializing in tools and content engineering, graphics, or editing and proofing on a peer basis. However, the additional value derived from these activities is not usually visible or appreciated much beyond the tech pubs department itself.
In contrast, some additional roles indicated by the current tech pubs landscape have the capability of boosting the profile of tech writers and tech pubs groups, which can in turn create even more opportunities for recognition and reward within the organization. Note that most of these functions are being performed within tech pubs groups today to some degree; I’m not claiming any innovation; my goal is simply to organize some information and hopefully stimulate some thought. The most significant new roles that J and I discussed were:
- Content Aggregators
A content aggregator monitors and promotes, and probably collects or ‘aggregates’ valuable content from multiple sources. J cited an example of a popular tech writing blog that aggregates content from 3rd parties.
- Content Architects
This is a specialized position that already exists in some depts; J stressed the importance of defining this role as strategic, rather than tactical, as in the case of an information architect who is focused on the tactical information design for the current release.
As strategists, content architects need to understand and promote content architecture that meets both internal tech pubs requirements and meshes with enterprise-wide content strategy. Many organizations have yet to articulate a high-level content strategy, which is an opportunity for tech pubs groups to develop leadership and expertise and become valued partners in enterprise content strategy and implementation.
- Knowledge Managers
Knowledge managers ensure that valuable content is properly structured, stored, and identified so that it can be located and used throughout the organization. This could mean managing content to maximize it’s effectiveness across multiple repositories and metadata schemes. To be successful, KMs need subject matter expertise in the domain under their control, an understanding who uses the content, the patterns of knowledge creation and flow, as well as it’s lifecycle. The KM plays what will be the crucial role of transforming information into knowledge as an asset that can truly be leveraged over the course of its existence.
- Data Analysts
JM points out that some groups she knows of do this already; develop skills within the group to analyze whatever metrics and data are available. J and I agreed that this is an area with real growth potential in demonstrating ROI for tech pubs, and also for contributing valuable business intel to other groups within the organization. As personalization and collaboration increases on the web, robust analysis of who users are, and how they are interacting with content can support decisions within tech pubs, and also within product marketing, customer support, etc.
- Content Brokers
This is a term I coined for a role that is related to the Aggregator and KM roles, maybe it’s a combination of both. It basically consists of assisting all stakeholders in locating relevant content whether created by their org or elsewhere, so the person in this role might be blogging, researching, aggregating, monitoring or even moderating online communities; in short, a type of knowledge gadfly, who is reaching out to facilitate knowledge creation, and who also acts as a central point of contact for it’s dissemination.
- Facilitators of ‘Communities of Practice’
Communities of practice are not new, but are emerging as a distinct area of focus, thanks to the community-building tools that exist now on the web. Communities of practice organize themselves within a defined domain, and are focused on goals, tasks, and skills that are relevant to that domain.
Organizations that want to harness the power of the web to support, and foster the exchange of knowledge about their products and services need to understand how to build and sustain these types of communities; J and I agreed that technical writers and tech pubs groups already have many skills that are relevant to this role, and what’s more, that the technical content that is our traditional area of expertise is a logical foundation around which communities of practice can develop.
A final note: neither of us were overly sanguine about technical writers embracing expanding roles – tech writers as a group have earned a reputation as detail-oriented introverts, and overcoming that tendency will be a significant challenge that perhaps only a minority of those currently in the field be able to meet.
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This post summarizes the points that JM and I discussed regarding external factors driving tech pubs transformation. By external, we meant factors arising from changes in how consumers want and need to interact with technical content.
- Reduced demand for traditional ‘book’ format and formal deliverables
- Need for speed
I’m lumping these together because to me they seem very closely related. Audiences, whether end-users, developers, administrators, professional service engineers, support engineers, etc. don’t have time, and don’t expect to thread their way through a narrative structure and a paginated document to get at the information they need.
J’s team is using minimalist techniques as espoused by JoAnne Hackos, which have an overall impact on content architecture, workflow, and lifecycle; she readily admits that even at this late date, getting writers out of ‘book-thinking’ is difficult.
J and I agree that this is a significant and crucial challenge; if we leave our content locked in ‘books’ or other massive compilations that can’t be easily searched and navigated to answer specific questions and complete discrete tasks, our target audiences will increasingly abandon the product doc and solve their problems without our involvement.
What’s worse, we will be squandering company resources by developing information that goes unused, and at the same time forcing stakeholders to re-do our work in order to meet their own needs. Although legally, companies may always be required to produce documentation that no-one reads, that’s a pretty cynical and risky premise on which to stake your career.
There is evidence that software developers are turning away from both product doc and 3rd party books in favor of peer-to-peer communication via the web, as evidenced by sites like stackoverflow.com. Additionally, recent conversations I had with operators of a large retail technical content site were focused on delivering alternatives to book content, since the 3rd party market for tech books looks to be heading into a downward spiral of fewer readers, fewer titles, and decreasing shelf space.
As for the relationship between traditional, formal, deliverables and speed, JM puts it succinctly: “It’s much easier—and often faster—to ask someone in the next cube how to do something… The Web is a logical extension of this idea, where the person in the next cube becomes someone in the next state or country, or just someone anywhere who is online at the same time.” For me the question becomes, “What do technical writers need to do to become that person?”
- Increased modes of interacting with content and knowledge
I separated the ideas of content and knowledge, because the speed with which people can discover one another, form a relationship, and exchange knowledge online is pretty staggering. In online environments, knowledge can be exchanged effectively in very casual, informal, diffuse, fragmentary, and temporal forms – all of which are really anathema to the goals of traditional technical writing; in the past, it would have been our mission to capture, organize, and publish this ’street-level’ information in some enduring repository – in other words, turn it into ‘content’. Content development most definitely still needs to happen; but we are moving into a world in which various information channels will be treated as more or less equal knowledge sources, and credibility and authority will be based more on efficacy and reputation than solely on brand.
It’s always been easier to ask questions of peers than to delve into static information sources, but the social networking aspect of the web has increased the effectiveness of speedy, sloppy information from friends by increasing the potential number of trustworthy and knowledgeable friends and the speed with which one can locate and communicate with them.
As technical writers, we are experts at gathering and conveying information, and we need to continue to improve there, but we will also need to adopt a more public and personal role in communicating with our stakeholders by making our information and ourselves accessible through the social tools that the web provides today.
As J points out, we need to engage with a generation that has grown up online, and to do that we need to understand their expectations. I would add that we also need to understand that our audience today can and will develop solutions to meet their own needs without looking for direction or asking for permission. So the onus is on us to be relevant, and to participate and contribute in those environments and communities.
There is emerging theory and practice around online Communities of Practice, which J and I discussed as an area that technical writers should be developing expertise. As I plan to detail in a future post, the characteristics of online communities of practice have much in common with best practices in technical communication; many of the necessary skills for facilitating communities of practice are already present in the technical writer population, more than in other areas of the organization that are traditionally tasked with online community management.
Both the business environment and the audience for technical communication is changing, so it shouldn’t surprise those within the industry that we need to change as well. I should stress that I advocate building onto, not dispensing with, the value that we currently provide, the same as any other profession must do to remain viable. I’m sure it won’t be painless, but it should be fun and interesting…
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J and I discussed the following factors that we see driving tech pubs transformation, which I categorized as external and internal in origin. Internal drivers operating within organizations include:
- Speed
Publications groups (and probably any groups that produce content) are being asked to work faster, not only due to shorter product cycles and agile development methodologies, but to move toward continuous publishing; updating and releasing docs only in sync with product releases is becoming an untenable position within organizations where frequently updated web content sets the standard for all content providers.
J’s team uses a continuous publishing model to deliver frequently updated content, and we agreed that tech pubs can use continuous publishing as continuous improvement, to identify and focus on the essential content that must accompany the initial release, and fill in additional content over time, potentially allowing user feedback to help identify gaps and prioritize the follow-on efforts. The continuous publishing model also provides opportunities to increase relevance by integrating community comments and contributions.
- L10N / GllN
Even smaller organizations are adopting global strategies, and localization costs are decreasing, due to automation. These factors are leading to greater demand on tech pubs to develop, contribute, and/or respond to L10N / GllN initiatives. Many tech pubs groups have already worked through localization issues, tools, and the particular needs of technical content, and are well-positioned to play a more prominent, even leadership, role either in developing a localization strategy, or in collaboration with a separate globalization team. Organizations are looking to tech pubs groups to understand their own requirements, and develop and promote their own plans in this area; tech pubs groups can score points by having a comprehensive strategy in place, especially if it leverages investments that support single-sourcing, re-use, etc.
- Content Management
Content management is another area of growing awareness within organizations. Just as with localization, tech pubs groups that do not understand their own requirements and develop and promote their own plans will be at risk to combat or conform to enterprise-wide content management initiatives that do not address their needs. Additionally, the pressure to share content among multiple departments and business units will only increase; the days of insulated tech pubs silos are numbered. J and I readily agreed that component content management (CCM) is key to meeting both current demands on tech pubs, and to realizing future opportunities. CCM is not as widely understood within the tech pubs community, and outside of tech pubs, it is almost completely unknown. Most content management systems are designed for document management or web content; CCM systems are designed to manage components of documents as separate objects that can be arbitrarily updated, aggregated, translated, etc.
- Compliance / legal
This is an important aspect of technical communication that is often overlooked; there is a ‘bread and butter’ value that tech pubs supplies as part of the product release, both 508 and contractual for customers and partners; however innovative it might be to put all documentation on a wiki or let the user community write what most interests them, organizations will probably always need resources to produce ‘branded’ doc. J pointed out that her team spends resources making sure that all APIs are documented, rather than using automation to document all of them at a certain level, and then using talented programmer/writers to really enhance the APIs that are most interesting to customers. Again, this is an area in which tech pubs’ expertise can potentially elevate the discussion and reset priorities, resulting in enhanced productivity and ROI.
Next post will discuss external drivers; the factors that are driving user community behavior, and the impact that user behavior will have on the future of tech pubs.
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Talking tech pubs with JM
I had the first of what I hope will be a series of discussions with people in the tech pubs community about ROI, monetization, and changing roles of technical writers and groups a couple of weeks ago with JM, who manages tech pubs within one of the larger software companies on the planet. J’s group supports an IDE, so they are concerned mainly with a developer audience.
JM and I worked together over 10 years ago at a couple of different software companies, but we had been out of touch for a number of years until we connected on Scott Abel’s Content Wrangler site. We talked for over an hour, and I really enjoyed getting J’s thoughts and perspectives, which I’ll try to summarize here from the notes I took while we talked…
At a high level, we both feel strongly that the current web-based information landscape presents technical communicators with great opportunities to increase tech pubs relevance and effectiveness within organizations, and to customers and partners. This blog is one initial step in identifying and sorting through those opportunities; since tech pubs groups are pretty diverse in terms of industries, organizational structure, audiences, etc., the more voices in the mix, the better. If we ultimately want a new tech pubs model, we’ll need to build it up and generalize it from our specific experiences.
We also agreed that while the opportunities to transform tech pubs are real and readily apparent, stakeholders are looking to us not to do cool stuff for its own sake, but to respond to market forces as they apply to our discipline and deliver greater value from our efforts.
The next few posts will be a breakdown of our discussion, beginning with some of the important drivers for tech pubs that exist within organizations today…
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Back in the saddle…
I’ve been neglecting my blog in favor of some other priorities, and also because I was struggling with the direction I wanted to go in. So today’s entry marks a departure of sorts – I’ve decided to broaden my perspective a bit by opening a dialog with others projects within the tech pubs arena. Thanks to Scott Abel’s excellent Content Wrangler site, as well as LinkedIn, I’ve been forging and renewing relationships with various folks in the tech pubs community who are engaged in similar efforts and exercises related to ROI, monetization, and changing roles of technical writers and groups. My plan is to spend some time 1-1 discussing issues with as many as I can, and publishing their perspectives alongside my own.
The basic topic areas planned for discussion are:
- emerging opportunities in the tech pubs landscape
- contributing technical drivers (internal and external)
- changing role(s) for Technical Writer / Information Developer
- changing role(s) for Tech Pubs groups
- socialization of technical content
I have concluded the first of these discussions, and will be publishing the results over the next couple of days. I encourage readers who are interested in adding their voice to the main article section of this blog to contact me; I look forward to hearing your experiences and opinions!
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