GETTING AHEAD AS A LONE AUTHOR
5 BEST PRACTICES
Kai Weber
22 September 2010
TCUK 10

WHO AM I AND WHAT DO I KNOW ?
 1988 – Technical writer
 2001 – 2008 Employed lone writer
 2008 – Senior Technical Writer, SimCorp
 Coach, trainer, mentor
 M.A. in American Studies

GETTING AHEAD AS A LONE WRITER?
Carl Rakeman: “Pony Express” http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/

GETTING AHEAD AS A LONE WRITER
Benign neglect
▼
Learn to run the job (more) like a business
5 best practices
▼
Raised profile

1. HOW TO BUY YOURSELF TIME
 Eliminate internal inefficiencies.
 Move to(wards) topic-based authoring.
 Consider temporary skimping.
 Fight external inefficiencies.
 Resist or budget time-consuming tasks, such as testing.
 Plan and schedule documentation.
 Plunder time-saving methods and tools.
► Take charge of your time and your schedule.

2. HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR SKILLS
 Assess and emphasize your (relative) strengths.
 Add people skills.
 Collaborate with colleagues and trade skills.
► Do what you do best and collaborate.

3. HOW TO TREAT DOC AS A BUSINESS
 Estimate your documentation efforts.
 Account for efforts, past and future.
 Estimate writing, reviewing, editing by topic.
 Use past efforts, averages and experience.
 Embrace cost metrics.
 Resist seductive, but misleading metrics.
 Attribute efforts and costs to specific developments.
 Turn topic reuse into a corporate asset.
► “You can’t control what you can’t measure.”
- Tom DeMarco

4. HOW TO MAKE DOCUMENTATION AN ASSET
 Serve the customer, not the product or company.
 Address user tasks, not product features or intentions.
 Become the users’ advocate.
 Verify with surveys and user analysis.

4. HOW TO MAKE DOCUMENTATION AN ASSET
Kathy Sierra
Creating passionate users

5. HOW TO COLLABORATE
 Provide a clear interface
 To your sources: Engineers, developers, SMEs
 To stakeholders: Customer service, product managers, etc.
 To your manager
 Stand up for documentation and yourself.
 … and don't whine about language, grammar, etc.
► Learn from your topics: Collaborate!

GETTING AHEAD AS A LONE WRITER
1. Buy Yourself Time
2. Optimize Your Skills
3. Treat Documentation as a Business
4. Make Documentation an Asset
5. Collaborate
Thank you!

KEEP IN TOUCH!
 I blog at http://kaiweber.wordpress.com/
 I tweet at @techwriterkai