Strategic Technical Communicator panel at tekom12

Marijana Prusina, Nicky Bleiel, Sarah O’Keefe and Dr. Tony Self pooled their experience in an interesting and versatile panel session about the more strategic aspects of our profession.

The Strategic Tech Comm panel (photo thanks to Axel Regnet)

It was not so much a discussion as a fast-paced session of the experts sharing their thoughts on strategic issues and problems, so I’ll simply list some of the insights:

• Domain knowledge for a certain industry (as opposed to general tech comm skills) can be a great asset that you can use to build a career on, but it’s not necessary to become an expert in any one domain.
• To get a mandate or money from management, don’t argue in terms of quality, but rather in terms of cost: Show how improving documentation will either reduce cost or create additional revenue.
• Freelancing can work well, but you will need some things which are less essential if you are employed:
  • Considerable project management skills – even if only for your own projects
  • A good network of satisfied customers, other people who know and like your work, and other freelancers with whom you can exchange tips and tricks – and maybe even projects if they’re better skilled to take them on or when you are busy.
  • A snappy definition of your core services, skills and profile.
• To improve the reputation of tech comm and exert influence in your company, try these strategies:
  • Volunteer, if you can afford to, whether in a professional tech comm association or a standards committee.
  • Underpromise and overdeliver on your deliverables – and meet the deadlines you agree to.
  • Write a book – but be aware that you’ll mainly do it for marketing and influence: It’s a lot of work, and it won’t make you rich.
  • Be the advocate of users, who are satisfied, more productive and less costly to your tech support thanks to good documentation.
• Take all the training that makes sense to you and that you can get. Don’t forget about domain skills and software-related skills, for example, for API documentation. When training, keep in mind your resumé and what value you will add to your customers or your employer by adding a certain skill.

First day at tekom12

This is my second year at tekom, the world’s largest tech comm conference held annually in Wiesbaden, Germany. tekom is nominally a German conference that coincides with its international sibling conference tcworld in English. As the hashtag confusion on twitter shows once again, the English tech comm scene tends to use both names. (Which makes me wonder why the organizers don’t simply use the tekom name for the whole thing which has sessions in English and German…?)

My session on meaning in tech comm

I skipped the morning sessions, since I was feeling a little under the weather. I didn’t even get to tekom until around 1 pm, but in plenty of time for my own presentation on How our addiction to meaning benefits tech comm. I had submitted two very different talks, and I thank the organizers that they picked the “wacky” one. And to my surprise, I had about 100 people interested in meaning, semiotics and mental models! I thought the talk went well. I had some nice comments at the end and some very positive feedback on twitter afterwards.

You can find my slides on Slideshare and on the conference site. Sarah Maddox has an extensive play-by-play write-up of how my session went on her blog.

Content Strategy sessions

Scott Abel has put together a very good stream of content strategy sessions, where I attended the presentations of Val Swisher and Sarah O’Keefe (I also blogged about Sarah’s presentation). I’m not sure if my observation is accurate, but it seemed to me that there was less interest and excitement about this stream this year than at the premiere last year. As befits content strategy, both sessions I attended were strategic, rather than operational, so they dealt primarily with how tech comm fits into the larger corporate strategy.

Marijana Prusina on localizing in DITA

Then I went to hear Marijana Prusina give a tutorial on localizing in DITA. I have no first-hand experience with DITA, but I use a DITA-based information model at work, so this gave me a reality check of what I was missing by not using the real thing. Seeing all the XSLT you get to haggle with in the DITA Open Toolkit, I cannot exactly say that I regret not using DITA.

Beer & pretzels

Huge thanks to Atlassian and k15t who sponsored a reception with free beer & pretzels – and even t-shirts if you left them your business card. This coincided with the tweet-up. It was good to see tech comm colleagues from around the world (Canada, the US, Australia, France and Germany, of course). Some I had known via twitter or their blogs for a while, so it was a welcome chance to finally meet them in person.

– For more, many more session write-ups check out Sarah Maddox’ blog!

– So much for the first day, two more to come. I’m looking forward to them!