Conference Program Abstracts 2009

Agile Development Panel

Agile development, when properly implemented, provides an adaptive change management strategy for complex projects based on the tenets of customer-centered design and empirical process control.

Agile’s focus on prioritizing customer capabilities and its theme/story/task breakdown offers technical communicators a great opportunity to contribute to customer satisfaction and the company’s bottom line. However, Agile development’s high speed, limited planning documentation, and short delivery cycles create a unique set of challenges for content development groups. These challenges require a shift in thinking about their relationship with their product teams, resource management, task allocation, and completeness of information.

This panel discusses several adoptions of Agile. The panel discusses what worked well, what was problematic, and lessons learned over several releases. We conclude with an extended question and answer session.

Agility Now! Avoiding a Managerial Identity Crisis in an Agile World
Bill Gearhart – Comtech Services, Inc.

Agile development's emphasis on vertical alignment around product teams can be disorienting to those in information development management. This discussion covers how information development organizations are positioning themselves strategically and tactically to take advantage of the opportunities offered by Agile, while fending off the threats. We'll also discuss how to successfully guide your organization through the transition from waterfall to Agile.

Scrum as a Content Team’s Diagnostic Tool
Carl Chatfield – Microsoft Corporation

Scrum is a popular task and time management method employed by small software development teams. Some consider Scrum to be the most portable of the Agile software development methods, in that Scrum has been applied to work other than software development. Carl Chatfield has studied Scrum in Engineering Excellence, an internal software engineering best practices organization within Microsoft, and applied Scrum in his role as manager of a technical communications team at Microsoft. In this panel discussion, Carl will share his perspective on which aspects of Scrum are especially well suited to content development, and which do not fit well.

Reserving Your Space at the Trough—With All the Agile Pigs
Beth Thomerson – BMC Software, Inc.

For many reasons, writers are often considered a peripheral part of an Agile team. But to get the immense benefits from an Agile methodology, writers need to be considered “pigs” and be in the thick of the action, right at the trough with everyone else on the team. This discussion addresses the benefits to both the product team and customers when writers are pigs. You will also hear ideas and strategies for overcoming two of the most difficult barriers to truly being Agile: co-location and time-splicing.

A Day Sprint in the Life of a Manager: The Operational Realities of Leading a Team in an Agile Environment
Ann Teasley – Fiserv

You manage a large, centralized team of writers and designers supporting numerous product lines and customer types. REORG! Now you manage a much smaller team with a much narrower focus. And you’ve entered the agile world of XP and RUP. From our seating arrangement, to our sprint planning approach for project and resource management, to our increased interaction with our internal customers, to the way we prioritize our work, everything was different (sometimes better, sometimes worse). Learn from one manager’s experience and gain insight into the tactical operations necessary to lead a team of writers and designers in an agile environment.

Content for Tomorrow: Social Media and the Dilemma for Content Teams
Suzanne Sowinska – Microsoft Corporation
Alex Blanton – Microsoft Corporation

Social networking, social media, and other Web 2.0 technologies have changed the way that companies communicate to and exchange information with their customers. What experiments and big bets are content teams making to embrace these changes? Are we falling behind, leaping ahead, or just trying to keep stride with the complex possibilities we offer? This session provides ideas, guidance, and insights into how Microsoft and other web properties, user assistance, and information and publishing efforts are being designed to connect with customers in this new world.

Creating a Sense of Urgency
JoAnn Hackos – Comtech Services, Inc.

“It all starts with a sense of urgency.” As John Kotter informs us, the first step in introducing a change into an organization is to get people energized. When they believe they face an urgent need to improve processes, restructure documents, become more efficient, and meet customer needs more energetically, we know that we can move mountains. Without that sense of urgency, we face complacent staff members who are perfectly comfortable doing the same old thing, the same old way.

In our opening session of the 2009 Best Practices conference, join me in forming a base for the continued 3 days of conversations. We will explain what Kotter means and how we interpret the three prongs of his thesis: deathly complacency, a false sense of urgency, and a genuine sense of urgency.

We’ll then review Kotter’s four tactics:

Tactic one—Bring the outside in
Tactic two—Behave with urgency every day
Tactic three—Find opportunity in crises
Tactic four—Deal with the NoNos

Remember that the interactive conversation on Tuesday morning stems from these basic concepts. Please join me in reading our 2009 theme book, John Kotter’s A Sense of Urgency, to prepare.

The DITA Olympiad: Approaching and Managing a DITA Migration Collaboratively
Kathryn Showers – Symitar

How can a 10-person department afford to stop writing and take the time to define the extent and complexity of a project, as well as assign specific roles to persons or groups? What about capturing the details of a project? You know, creating guidelines and examples of how to write and tag a project so it doesn’t have to be re-planned and rewritten at a later date?

How can the Information Architect keep track of all the minutiae decided in the planning process to avoid over-committing the department’s resources and losing focus? What can the Information Architect use, or create using products already owned by the technical writing department, to organize, manage, and report the status of projects? Once the technical writers hit the ground running (writing) and produce a plethora of quality work, how will the editor know which pieces belong where, and in what context? Sure, verb agreement and active voice are important, but so are correctly tagging information and setting appropriate attributes; not to mention identifying reusable pieces writers overlooked.

Concerning these and other issues, have I got a story for you!

From Communication to Collaboration to Community—Content Strategies for Web, Wikis, and Workspaces
Helen Cavender – Cisco Systems, Inc.
Paul Zimmerman – Cisco Systems, Inc.

Whether using websites, wikis or workspaces, whether planning for one-way communication, collaboration or customer communities, defining your own content strategy is crucial. Consider what types of content and what tools might be needed for certain audiences or activities. See examples of how different content strategies work in a Web 2.0 environment.

Innovation: No Really—We are Serious
Palmer Pearson – BMC Software, Inc.

Embracing new ideas is always an important and progressive step towards developing and delivering useful technical communication. But in tough economic times, innovation often falls by the wayside in favor of simply surviving. But, the fact is, turning to innovation is a task that can save your projects and your staff. Learn how to draw more attention and support for innovation at a surprisingly high level, now.

Maintaining and Enhancing Productivity in the Face of Process Change
JoAnn Hackos – Comtech Services, Inc.
Maria Brownstein – Sybase

Many of you have committed your organizations to significant process changes in order to move into topic-based authoring and content management. The intent of the changes are increasing efficiency and decreasing the costs of information development. While some organizations have seen immediate productivity gains, others have experienced decreased productivity. Learn how to evaluate productivity changes and ensure that you maintain high levels of efficiency in the face of process change.

Where the Time Goes: Using Metrics for Resource Planning
Christopher Gales – Wind River Systems

When you know you need more writers, how do you prove that you're right? This year, Wind River Technical Publications embarked on a two-pronged effort to collect metrics that will enable our executive sponsor to present fact-based resource requests with real data supporting them. This presentation describes how we combined time tracking data with requirements analysis to develop a picture of where our writers spend their time and how efficiently they are able to work. Using this data, we can fundamentally alter the conversations we have about resource planning as well as provide a solid foundation for discussing infrastructure and process improvements.

Creating a Customer Survey
Bill Tilley – Symantec Corporation

Too many organizations today are simply writing content for their next scheduled release, without any sense of who their audience is, where they’re trying to retrieve information from, and the type of information that they’re searching for. Without this knowledge, your content can become a source of frustration for your customers, as well as an exercise in futility for your writers. The purpose of this session is to discuss how to implement a customer survey that will help you obtain a clearer picture of your audience so that you can better shape and target your content for them. The following points will be discussed:

• Survey basics
• Identifying what you want to learn
• Distribution techniques
• Parsing results
• Making post-survey decisions

In this session, Bill discusses the experience that his team went through in creating a customer survey. This includes his reasons for creating the survey, the infrastructure he needed to manage this process, an analysis of his survey results, and the impact the survey results had on the way in which his writers work.

Never Waste a Good Crisis
Daphne Walmer – Medtronic, Inc.

Layoffs. Unplanned employee turnover. Hiring freezes. Missed deadlines. Looming workloads. Impossible schedules. As painful as crises are, it's often easier to make needed changes in response to crises than at other times. Learn how one manager got approval to add personnel in the middle of a reduction in force.

Working Across Organizational Boundaries
Scott Wahl – Research In Motion

We all work in various departments and functional areas—tech pubs, development, marketing, training, support, and so on. But our customers don’t care about organizational boundaries—they just want access to the information they need to use our products and services successfully, whether it is product interfaces, on-product help, documentation, training, web sites, or technical support. This panel will discuss various ways that groups have tried to overcome organizational silos to create a more complete and consistent information experience for their customers.

Participation, Education, and Cooperation
Terry Barraclough – Symitar

Too often technical publications groups operate in isolation. In a typical process, product development teams design a new product, software engineers perform the coding, quality assurance teams test the product, support departments prepare their staff to support the release, marketing departments create brochures, and sales staff begins to pre-sell the product. When everyone else is done with their part of the process, someone thinks to ask, “What about the documentation?” Where is the technical publications department in this process? The technical writers have been working behind the scenes, starting from design documents, interviewing subject matter experts, and if possible, testing the documentation against the software. But few outside the technical publications department know what technical writers do, how they do it, or how long it takes. Products are designed and deadlines set without input from those tasked with documenting the product.

That model doesn’t lend itself to quality documentation and never has. How do you break down the barriers between technical writers and other groups? How do you get other departments to see the technical publications department as an equal partner in product delivery and support? How do you ensure that sufficient time for documentation is allowed in the product plan? In short, how does technical writing come out of the dark and into the light? Participation, education, and cooperation. Learn how a small technical writing group has increased their participation in product delivery, raised awareness of the requirements and benefits of quality technical publications, and encouraged inter-departmental cooperation.

Eclectic Information Sources and Access Points
Tom Parker – ADP Dealer Services

Historically, technical publications has typically been the purveyance of technical publications groups, training has typically been the purveyance of training organizations, support bulletins have typically been the purveyance of support organizations, sales collateral has typically been the purveyance of product marketing organizations, etc., etc., etc. All of these information vehicles can take many forms, both electronic and hardcopy, and each provides specific and necessary knowledge that clients and associates alike need to fully take advantage of systems and/or products they purchase or support.  However, seldom is access to all these information vehicles available in a seamless and integrated fashion. Users are often forced to search and/or guess where to go for the type of information they need, when they need it.

How can we eliminate, or at least minimize, access barriers for users to the type of information they need at any given time? Learn how one company has begun a concerted and systematic effort to break down political, technical, and communication barriers between organizations to consolidate and integrate various information types, and make them available to all types of users anytime, anyplace.  Most importantly, hear how the company is going about making users aware that all of these information types are available and how to get to them. After all, even the best information is of no value if people can’t easily get to it or don’t know that it exists.

Making it Work: Opportunities and Obstacles
Elizabeth Anders – Symantec

In 2000, a group at Symantec created the Unified Content Strategy initiative to cross organizational boundaries in order to unify, repurpose, and leverage as much reusable content as possible. Symantec has grown to be a 6 billion dollar company over the past ten years. During that time, Symantec acquired over 20 companies, one even larger than Symantec itself. This resulted in InfoDev’s published page count increasing by tenfold with content development groups all using different standards and tools in all parts of the world.

We set about to have one Symantec voice which required a consistent, locatable answer to every question no matter which segment of our market was asking. We made a case for tools that would force the consistency and integrate the content. Our new strategy created enforceable standards for XML authoring and brought every author into a content management system that is used across many organizational boundaries to deliver print, PDF, and online help content.

Planning Collaborative Work so that Teams Remain Efficient
Charlotte Robidoux – Hewlett-Packard Company
Bobbi Gibson – Hewlett-Packard Company

Is the refrain, “Who has time to plan?” familiar in your organization? Do authors maintain that working on their own is the only surefire way to be efficient? Do they claim that working in XML takes more time? Struggling with writers over project planning and coordinating activities is not a new problem. Nor is it unusual to hear protests about authoring tools. Documentation managers are all too familiar with authors skipping the planning process, owning complete documents, and detecting flaws in the tools. But single sourcing complexities only invigorate these struggles. From information modeling and metadata to figuring out how to map, share, and optimize content, single sourcing fundamentals—both planning and collaborating—can add overhead to projects. Despite apparent inefficiencies, effective planning and collaborating can optimize reuse and impact ROI. This session provides various approaches to effective planning and collaborating to ensure reuse efficiency; you will learn:

• Ways to rethink planning and collaboration
• How to draw on different types of collaboration
• How collaborative teams can share planning tasks
• How to measure the benefits of planning and collaborating
• Strategies for building strong collaborative teams
• Strategies for using virtual tools to promote collaboration