James Conklin, Overcoming Change Resistance at STC12

In “Understanding and Overcoming Resistance to Change”, James Conklin focuses on change, rather than on management as most change management seems to do. Why change fails The problem with many change management initiatives is that they fail. Too many of the involved people perceive change as a thing that is “out there”. So instead of [...]

My webinar slides as PDF handout

If you’ve attended my webinar “Getting ahead as a lone writer”, you might be interested in the slides in PDF: They were supposed to be made available to attendees by the STC, but apparently that hasn’t happened as I’ve just learned yesterday. If you have any more questions about the webinar or being a lone [...]

Get ahead as a lone tech writer with a STC webinar

A compact 1-hour STC webinar gives you the low-down about getting ahead as a lone writer, from tools to strategy – plus two words every lone writer should know how to use. What? Writers are often the only person in a company who create and maintain documentation. Lone writers who operate without a dedicated budget [...]

Half-way DITA: Why some is better than none

If DITA seems like a good idea, but you cannot make the case for it, you can move towards structured writing and make your documentation “future-proof” by meeting the standard half-way. At the company I work for, we tech writers created manuals in parallel, but separate to online help. Over time, this gave us a [...]

Tech comm trends 2012, mashed up and commented

2012 is the year when tech comm’ers need to understand business processes and align documentation with new technologies, say tech comm pundits – and yours truly. What I expect for 2012 Tech comm’ers need to understand business processes. Okay, so this trend is not exactly new, but I expect it will gain traction this year. [...]

Top 3 tech comm lessons in 2011

2011 was an eventful year for me as a tech writer. Here are the three most important lessons I learned this year. Content strategy can change tech comm in 2 ways … and only one of them is up to us tech writers: Tech comm departments can engage in content strategy bottom-up, connect with stakeholders [...]

Auditing Documentation and Processes at tcworld11

Auditing your documentation, and your processes, can help you to gauge estimates and issues as you prepare for localization or content migration. That’s what I learned in Kit Brown-Hoekstra’s useful 2-hour workshop at tcworld (tekom’s international half). You can easily do the audit yourself: Take a little time, step back from your documentation, and identify [...]

Join me for “Getting ahead as a lone writer” at tekom

If you’re attending the tekom conference in Wiesbaden, consider joining me for my updated presentation “Getting ahead as a lone writer” on October 19 at 8:45 a.m. in room 12C as part of tekom’s international, English-speaking tcworld conference. My presentation will be an updated version of the session I did at TCUK 10. I will [...]

Favorite tech writing dogmas

I’m usually wary of dogmas, but some just won’t go away, they assert their eternal truth in uncanny ways. I’ve recently found some new ones, so I now have four five tech writing dogmas: A new tool will not fix broken processes. No matter how cool you are as a software company, don’t build your [...]

All aboard! Onwards to structured authoring!

Our team of technical writers is embarking on a journey towards structured authoring. With 10 writers, we’ll move from an unstructured Word to PDF/CHM environment to a structured Flare to WebHelp/PDF environment. Or I should say “semi-structured”: We do have an information model based on DITA, but we won’t actually be able to enforce it [...]