My Blog has Moved

I bought a new URL, WhyTechComm.com, hired a web designer to style it and add some features I was wanting. I’ll be polishing and tweaking there, still, but I’m pretty pleased with the transformation. I’m aiming for less focus on my professional foibles and more discussion of how tech comm supports business goals.

I moved all my old posts there, so if you’ve commented on a post, your comments were also moved there. Please let me know if you don’t want that, and I will remove them.

This will be my last post over here. Hope to see you on the other side.

Did AmerIndians Have Kaizen? How to Use Metrics

A People’s History of Business Trends

I took American History as an Advanced Placement course in high school, so I’m not sure why signed up for it again my second semester at New College, but it was worth it.

The class met in a small, bookshelf-lined room in a waterfront mansion built in the 1920′s by John and Mabel Ringling. As in Ringling Brothers. We sat around a shiny oak table and discussed our readings with a professor who entertained the Dalai Lama whenever His Holiness was in town. 

Photo by livingonimpulse.

When we started reading about Andrew Jackson, and the Trail of Tears, the professor started off the discussion referring to Native Americans as American Indians and then shortened it thereafter to AmerIndians, which was handy. I wonder if any of the other students wanted to cop the term as badly as I wanted to. None of us did; not in class. In fact, I don’t remember many of us talking much at all. But I was pretty dumbstruck by most of the New College experience, so maybe it was just me who was mute.

For the first time, I saw what happened to American Indians as a series of political plays. By themselves, many of the moves were cold-blooded and villainous, some were regular old greed and bureaucracy. The process of genocide became even more shocking when conversationally disrobed of its mystery. It was a great class.

I’m also part Cherokee (who isn’t?), and I’ve done some reading about their culture. So, when I began slowly making my way through A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, this summer, I had already read a bit about social and governance traditions for various tribes when I came across this passage quoting historian Dale Van Every:

The freedom of the individual was regarded by practically all Indians north of Mexico as a canon infinitely more precious than the individual’s duty to his community or nation.

Zinn goes on to describe tribal government as, “an occasional assembling of a council, with a very loose and changing membership, whose decisions were not enforced except by the influence of public opinion.”

During my New College years, that would have pleased me, though I doubt I could have actually envisioned the daily functioning of that kind of system. Now, it makes me uneasy. I mean, isn’t that just a vague meeting with action items like, “Okay, consider doing what we discussed today,” and, “Make sure everyone knows how advisable this is”? Shudder.

Zinn quotes a minister who lived among Indians, “. . . [A] government in which there are no positive laws, but only long established habits and customs, no code of jurisprudence . . . in which age confers rank, wisdom gives power, and moral goodness secures title to universal respect.” It sounded dismally conservative and unchanging to me. Where was the continuous improvement?

As I read the chapter and experienced my own reaction, I realized I would probably horrify New-College-Age me.

In Which I Overwhelm and Alienate

In the past year, I have been reading about content strategy, so I’ve been learning how to base content, including product documentation, on business needs. To some extent, my company does this naturally. They know that we need docs to satisfy the labeling requirement imposed by the FDA, so they hired all us tech writers. Of course, docs can do more than that, but justifying the means to other business ends requires some sales work on our part. So I’ve become obsessed with various metrics that can help with that.

I’ve also been working on audience analysis, with the goals of making our writing process more efficient and our information more findable. I’ve wanted to measure the users so that we can only write what we need to, with the assumption that we are currently writing way to much about some things and not enough about other things. The assumption is that we are not instinctually writing what the users need, nor are we hitting the mark based on the few anecdotes that have been shared with us.

I have wanted to be systematic, and there has been friction. I had my review last week, and I had all high marks, but with one piece of criticism regarding my collaboration skills, “. . .[S]ometimes Kristi can overwhelm and alienate her team mates with her initiatives and the depth to which she wants to be systematic in her approach.” Ouch.

It was not the first time my boss has mentioned this, and I’ve been working on it. It’s been hard for me to empathize with the aversion to metrics. My boss has expressed such a faith in the autonomy of the team, though, and in honoring their interests and preferences, that I’ve been exploring this blind spot of mine.

My reaction to the AmerIndian anarchy provided a clue. Maybe I should be doing metrics in moderation. Maybe I am overindulging. Commerce has not always been in this form, as Clue Train points out, and continuous improvement might arrive by other paths. If too many numbers spell a fear-based workplace for some people, what is the proper role for metrics?

In Which I Count Calories for Less Than a Week

I have had an extra 30 pounds on me since not long after I started working as a technical writer. I’m 5’10”, so it’s not as extreme as it might be for a smaller woman, but it’s still uncomfortable.

I’ve had a few anorexic friends. I have a pretty good idea of what an unhealthy food conversation sounds like. I feel half-anorexic after one conversation about food with just about any woman, and so I have resisted  counting calories, but I’m doing it for a limited time to recalibrate my ability to judge how much food is too much for one day. I’m doing it because I was running four and five miles and still not dropping pounds.

And after about two weeks of not even being diligent about the calorie counting, I’m seeing a difference.

It was the same way with budgeting. I set up the budget, and was diligent about counting every dollar for three or four months, and then I just internalized it. I more or less memorized the amounts and got used to the idea that there was a finite number of dollars available.

So how does that relate to performance metrics? How does it relate to the business goals of product documentation, and measuring the needs of customers?

Maybe it’s just that people don’t want their entire working days tied to someone else’s interpretation of the numbers. Maybe people want some control over which numbers are helpful. Maybe we want people we trust to lead that discussion, or else we’re going to keep doing what has gotten us raises and reasonable working hours, thanks very much.

#stc10

The Twitter feed on the conference site was addictive and tortuous. Like wiggling a tooth. I was crashing the conference; attending some networking events, gathering requirements for the UUX site overhaul, and attending one of the pre-conference workshops, but not the conference at large. Since I was staying with family, my evenings and non-SIG times were spent meeting my cousins’ babies and talking about their business.

I loved that, but I really missed the conference experience I had last year. Last year, I met almost every STC person on my Twitter list and asked questions related to every project I had going. I even attended the awards banquet, because chapter-member Karen Bachmann became an Associate Fellow.

Still, it was absolutely worth being there in person, even on that piece-meal basis. As much as I wanted to dive into the #stc10 feed and find every tweetup, I had to focus on a just few things, which is probably good practice for me.

The Suncoast Chapter

During the morning session of Leadership Day, I picked up some information about legal requirements for chapter officers. Dear volunteers: I didn’t say anything about this when we recruited you, but we’ve got to come up with a conflict-of-interest policy, whistle-blower policy, and a new tax form. And, we have to watch our asses, because we’re liable. But the tradeoff is we can ask the Society for money, which I didn’t know before this weekend. “Zero-based budgeting doesn’t mean zero money.” Rah-rah, please RT.

I’m happy to know that we can build conference attendance into our budget next year, and I’m proud that we made it through this last year on our own financial resources, but I’m annoyed by how hit-or-miss it is getting information about chapter resources and responsibilities.

For example: I think Leadership Day is important enough that new officers should either get sponsored to attend or it should be available in e-learning modules that get a lot of PR with new officers. If I hadn’t been so hyped about attending the conference last year, I still might not know about Leadership Day. There was a woman there who had been volunteering for 13 years without having heard of it. Ridiculous.

I know STC has had to concentrate on making it through the budget shortfall, and I fully expected other improvements to be deferred. Now that they’ve made it through that crisis, I hope streamlined communication is a priority.

The UUUUX

At this point, the biggest reason I’m involved with the UUX SIG is because I want to be in on the site redesign. Yes, I also want to know how to do usability testing, and user analysis, but I really want to learn what all is involved in shipping a website.

During the conference, on Twitter, a usability consultant (not an STC member) who was presenting, Whitney Hess, asked about our SIG name. She thought the UUX acronym was strange, and possibly at odds with the universal handle, UX. Why does the SIG name, Usability and User Experience, call out user experience but not other parts of the discipline, such as information architecture?

At the business meeting, Ginny Redish and Whitney Quesenbery gave some insight into the history behind the name. When the SIG was named in 1992, the name choice was intended to expand the thinking about usability into the area of interaction design. While it’s true that we could also specifically call out other disciplines as pieces of usability, we also have to end the name somewhere. We have an IA SIG, so that’s one place we draw a little line between the two. Does it make sense? We can talk about it.

That’s a big part of planning the new site: identifying our members. Why are they here as opposed to (or in addition to) some other usability organization? Some of our members have gone on to be leaders in other UX organizations–should part of our focus be connecting members with those organizations?

That research will help support part of a larger goal for the SIG this year: finding our synergy with UPA and the larger UX community, with the TC BoK, and with other SIGs.

Teh Content Strategicals

My employer paid for me to attend the Architecting Content workshop by Rahel Bailie. I asked for the UX workshop first, because I thought it would be easier to justify, but that one got changed to a regular session, so I resubmitted my request and asked for Rahel’s workshop, and it got approved. Boy, are they in for it.

I can hardly sit still during a content strategy presentation. I want to jump up and get my manager, and my director, and the CEO, and make them watch the session. I want to run home and practice my ROI and IRR justifications in front of the mirror before I forget how the presenter delivered them. I want to draw pictures on the white board.

Perhaps what I need now in order to move forward in this area is not more content strategy sessions, but deep breathing exercises.

I asked Rahel how I can use this information now, while I’m an employee rather than a consultant. It’s not easy to tie content goals to corporate goals when I am not privy to corporate goals. She explained that I can help my manager do it. I give the information to my manager and she passes it up the chain. One of the ways that Rahel got to be consultant was by being good at speaking the executives’ language. She kept being asked to explain to the execs how the initiates supported the business.

Taking a deep breath…

Other Blog Posts About the Conference

Read these; they’re good:

• STC 2010 Day Four Super Summary
• Trust and Transparency #stc10

How Real Do We Need to Get about Our Documentation?

Our team has been working on reorganizing our template for help system content, and last week we showed it to clients in an online demo. We also went on our first-ever client site visit to a hospital that uses our laboratory information systems. The lid is off Pandora’s box.

We’ve been asking to get our hands on clients for years. When we got our new manager a year or so ago, she led an organized effort to this end. We were told to use internal resources, first. So now we receive the relevant emails from the user listserv. And the irrelevant ones.

We were told to comb the knowledge base for things that ought to be added to our manuals. My product alone has almost 200 articles. My plan is to categorize them and prioritize them so I can start incorporating the information. But it’s overwhelming.

I started asking around about getting access to demographic information on clients from the marketing database, and was told to watch my step in that inquiry because that information is fiercely guarded. So I’m saving that task for a day when I feel especially crafty.

The help design project, though, was an opportunity to talk directly with the clients. Ostensibly, we wanted their opinions on the prototype. But it was also an opportunity to chat about what they do all day (it was mainly a group of system administrators, who test the system and make sure everyone is using it correctly). By coincidence, we were scheduled in the same week for the standard hospital tour that our tech support new hires get. It was a chance to ask a boatload of users what they think of our current help systems.

They don’t think much of them, that’s what.

The system administrators use them when they absolutely must. The end users (technologists, phlebotomists, lab managers, nurses..) all ask the system administrators when they hit a snag in the system. Period.

Admittedly, I’m generalizing from one site visit and and one call with 15 sys admins. But this is 100% more information than we had the week before. I think we’ve got some solid areas to test. Such as: how long does it take for an end user to solve an issue in the system if they look it up in help vs. how long does it take if they call the sys admin and ask for help?

There seems to actually be resistance to end users using help. “They don’t have time to be clicking around in the system.” Should we be advocating for help use or should we give it up and write directly to the system administrators; give them more tools to help the end users themselves?

I cringe now when I think about how many heated discussions we had over verbiage that no one is going to read and links that no one is going to click.

A team member had a good question: how are we going to reconcile all this feedback (part of the new help design incorporated even more client feedback features) with the standards we’ve worked so hard to develop? Is there going to be push-and-pull there?

Our manuals are huge. Our systems are complex. We want to have time to incorporate video and be responsive to feedback. How real do we need to get about what we can leave out?

The COTA Department

Our company bought us a fancy training about organizing email by Mike Song, with a bonus section on file organization. I learned COTA, which is a way of organizing your files that uses four top-level folders: Clients, Output, Teams, and Admin. Here’s a review of the book, The Hamster Revolution, that outlines the system, if you want a bit more info on the system. If you are put off by taking productivity tips from a book that features a talking hamster, I recommend the white papers or the trainings, instead.

During most of the presentation, I was noticing that the guidelines for making something easy to find on my PC are the same as the guidelines making things easy for customers to find in a help system or on a site. Don’t bury it in too many clicks–don’t make the folder structure too deep, but don’t overwhelm with a vast surface array of folders or books. Have one place to go for your files/information. Organize by function. Have meaningful labels. Have a universal standard.

Is this not part of content strategy for a company? The company’s stuff should be easy for employees to find, and it should be efficient to create. One person creating it one time, everyone finding it in the same place, verifying that one has the right version without checking in eight other places. And, maybe this shouldn’t be each employee’s daily responsibility, this attention to info efficiency. Wouldn’t it save time if someone with training in this strategy showed them how to do it, management enforced the standards, and it became a habit? Like time-sheeting tasks or using file naming conventions. It takes an investment to make this happen, it seems to me. It takes personnel with training in information strategy.

At this training, I learned that email is probably the thing I’ll do most in my career, as far as sheer volume (except tweeting?), so I’ll probably want to master it. I’ve read and partly implemented Getting Things Done, so I was comparing Mike’s system to that, and he did outline some pitfalls of GTD without naming names. I have to say, I never did set aside the recommended two days to fully implement GTD, though I have still seen a ton of benefit, but implementing COTA with my existing files is going to take about two hours. I have two hours. I never seem to have two days.

Mike also led us (quickly, not tortuously) through a bunch of Outlook tips. This is a bigger deal than it maybe seems, because it’s the details that can keep me from sticking with an organizational trick. For example, of course a document that I receive as an email attachment shouldn’t live on my tasklist AND in an email folder AND in My Documents. But prior to this training, I thought I couldn’t drag-and-drop an email to my tasklist and retain the attachment. Low and behold, I can right-click and drag, and the options are available for retaining attachments. I know–yawn. But when I find these gems, I’m happy, because it’s the details that make or break a productivity trick for me.

“I already almost have my files that way, and I still can’t find things,” a co-worker told me. I think “almost” can be quite a big difference from all the way. Having some rules for overlap, versus making up a new rule each time you file something, for example.

It’s time consuming for each worker to be sitting at their desk carefully considering each thing they file, and often reaching different conclusions. Having put so much time and money into getting us this training, I hope we are going to implement some of these ideas on team servers, and not just use them alone in our padded cubicles.