No matter what size your company is, or how well-known, I can assure you, every opportunity grasped or missed is the direct, straight-line result of a decision made or a decision delayed.
At lots of companies, decisions get stuck in a pipeline of waiting, approval, hemming and hawing, and sometimes they just die on a vine of withering that is just plain sad to see. Call it bureaucracy, call it checks and balances, call it whatever you like, but it is the companies that are agile, that pivot quickly (stop me if I venture too far into buzz words here, but they caught on for a reason) that survive and even thrive to defeat the others.
Making good decisions, and making them quickly, are the shining coins of successful businesses.
So why is a tech writer posting anything about them? I thought you’d never ask! You see, technical writing has ventured into the deep, lush forest of what now has the lovely, shiny name of “Product Operations” at some of those agile, savvy businesses. Those smart folks took a look around and figured out that the smart folks typing away were…wait for it…learning.
Yes, indeed. And they were right.
We writers have been busy doing, you guessed it, reading. We actually read the stuff we write, believe it or not, and some of it seeps in and we understand it. So when it came time to clear the bottlenecks of business, it sort of made sense to turn to the technical writers who’ve been sitting there reading and writing everything from user guides to employee handbooks all these years and ask them for some insight.
Some of us agreed to offer an opinion or two, and Product Operations was born.
One of the repeated mantras, week in and week out, that I offered to my teams in this process was:
If you oppose, you must propose.
Yep – learn it, commit it to memory. Take it to your teams. Feel free to swipe it. I think I stole it from someone else, and I’m not giving them credit here, so you don’t even have to say you nicked it from me, you can just take it and use it and hog all the credit. (See if it gets you a bit of a promotion or a raise. That’d be nice.)
What it means is, you can point out where something goes wrong – a process, a system, a way of doing things. Go ahead and say it doesn’t work. But then – you have to pony up a way to fix it. We may not use that way, but we won’t ditch it right out of the gate. The most important thing is, you can’t just complain. If you don’t have some sort of solution in mind, even a solution that, in the end, doesn’t fit, you have to keep your trap shut. Don’t point out the flaw until you’ve conjured up a workaround. Even a bad workaround.
A less-than-great decision executed quickly is usually better than no decision executed, or a good decision executed slowly. I mean, a bad decision is going to be a bad decision no matter what. But if you have a brilliant idea but it takes you five years to execute on it, do you really think it was worth it? You can tweak and modify as you go if you just get out of the gate. This is not cutting your bangs we’re talking about here, and even if it was, they’ll grow back. Usually we are talking about developing a new software program or implementing meeting-free Tuesdays. Start building Rome right away. By the time you get the blueprints made, you’ll find the perfect bricklayer, I assure you.
Start mixing mortar.
Right there, that’s the trick. Pick up a stick, or a shovel, or whatever the implement is, and choose. It’s just mortar. You can’t stir it once it dries. So, begin making decisions on a small scale in order to bring about success. As my grandmother once told me, everything can be fixed except death.
I think she might have been exaggerating a bit, so I don’t take it quite that far, but I have determined as a writer that until I hit “send” or “publish,” that I can just decide to write, I can move words around, I can float ideas and concepts, and that to do so is never bad.
In the mode of Product Operations, I started looking at things like information architecture, content strategy, and the blend of systems as a necessary way to get decisions made.
Lo and behold, it worked.
My team began to look at the gaps in our processes and realized that although we each knew what to do when there was a software outage, we each knew what to do when we had to deliver “less than positive” news to a partner or affiliate, we had never concretized that anywhere. So, off we went to create an “Incident Management Guide.”
Similarly, although we had our system down cold for how to manage time and processes in-house, we realized that if a significant part of our team left by, say, taking new opportunities with other companies, the knowledge vacuum would be fierce. The amount of just “stuff” we carried around in our brains about the day-to-day that kept the job pleasant and smooth was astonishing. So we set out to make it a thing. This was despite our tendency as a crew to just be renegade in our approach to daily office behavior, where a meeting was just as likely to be over coffee as it was to be in a conference room. Suddenly, processes and procedures were born.
Some decisions matter, some don’t.
All of this is to say, throughout my years (and they are numerous) I have found that there’s a certain transition from small operation to large, from laid back attitude to not, and back again, that says you somehow gotta put some stuff in writing even when you are pretty sure you don’t. It just makes life easier when you deputize people to have The “D” and to turnaround that decision more easily because they know they can. To build a team with that mojo because it says in a manual (online or in print, with chill or without – you do you) that they can. We built a very nifty team of people, and then we were really able to get stuff done on a big scale by saying, “here’s how we get stuff done.”
I’m just pointing out that it makes life easier if you know:
Do you got the “D”?
A conversation with a (junior) colleague this morning started off with “How did you decide to reformat your Best Practices Guide?” and moved on to things like “But how did you know that you should be working in Artificial Intelligence and VUI for this search stuff? I mean, how do you know it will work?”
According to Forrester, 79% of customers would rather use self-service documentation than a human-assisted support channel. According to an Aspect CX survey, 33% said they would rather “clean a toilet” than wait for Support. Seriously? Clean a toilet? That means I need to have some very user-friendly, easily accessible documentation that is clear, concise, and usable. My customers do NOT want to head over to support. It makes them angry. It’s squicky. They have very strong feelings about making support calls. I am not going to send my customers to support. The Acquity group says that 72% of customers buy only from vendors that can find product (support and documentation) content online. I want my customers’ experience to be smooth and easy. Super slick.
You see, a few weeks ago, my development team here at my office had what we all an “innovation sprint.” That is where we get to blow off some steam and quit working on our traditional run of the mill development tasks and think, instead, about the kinds of things we would do if we didn’t have customer deadlines and goals. We get to open up our imaginations and play around a bit – so what we did was to imagine what would happen if we could get something like the Amazon Echo to talk to mainframe computers and therefore get mainframe computers to talk back to the Amazon Echo – the ultimate in automation processes, as it were. Now mind you, the entire team does not have to participate. This process is totally voluntary. Team members can catch up on overdue work or sketch out other projects that they may want to work on in the future. They can conceive of ways to make their workdays easier or to otherwise improve the customer experience, that sort of thing.
pursuing a certification in Content Strategy. Yes, content. I rather enjoy thinking of my writing as “content.” While I agree that there may be more nuanced terms for some forms of writing – and we may be more specific: poetry, haiku, essay, short story, etc., in the world of technical communication, marketing and corporate communications, what we create is…wait for it…content. But I was more bent out of shape because when asked, I introduce myself as a writer. I rarely qualify this term unless I need to.
People consume my content, not the way they consume a classic novel or even a beach read. They do not recommend my work to their friends as the next great thing to read, and they do not say, “Hey, did you see that great process that Susan just created? Wow! Talk about incredibly lean doc!” That, my friends, is the dream of any software documentation writer, I assure you. But maybe, just maybe, what some of my friends say is, “Susan wrote an insightful blog about the value of Content Writing and how it is important, just like writing your memoir. After all, that technical document will show you how to set up your new laptop so that you can write your memoir. And then you can stick your nose in the air and claim that is real writing, not merely content.”
In Agile Software Development,
developing software, but in the embracing of documentation as part of that software, but instead it is often “kicked to the curb” by many teams as a misinterpretation of that one element of the original manifesto.
I know I just posted yesterday, but I have had a working draft of this piece in the hopper for a while; it just never quite grew its feet, as I like to say. And I can’t put a piece on the blog until it has its own feet. But today, being Women’s Day and all, the piece found its feet.
Have a Pint at the Tech Pub 