What should a documentation dashboard actually measure?

Someone recently asked on LinkedIn: “Can anyone point to resources on quality/heartbeat dashboards for technical documentation? BKMs or case studies?” It’s a really important question. There are dashboards throughout organisations, but not always in the Technical Publications department. Dashboards give senior leaders a clear view of what teams are working toward and how close they… Read more »

Can a Technical Author be a master of more than one trade?

Technical Authors are normally seen as masters of writing user documentation, but their skills are not often applied to other areas of the business. For example, it’s usually the case our clients for software documentation are different from our procedures writing clients. However, we’re currently working for a client where we began by editing a… Read more »

Why you probably shouldn’t use Word to create your policy documents

Imagine you are an IT manager for an organisation that has been implementing new IT systems. You have now reached the point where you need to create and document the new IT policies and procedures. The organisation already has some general policies for IT in its staff handbook, but you need to provide more detailed… Read more »

Topic-based authoring: The undiscovered country

Many software companies, when they start out, provide user documentation as downloadable PDFs or as web pages. As they develop more products and versions, and as they expand into countries that use different English spellings, the amount of documents can grow until it becomes hard to keep all of these documents up to date. It’s at… Read more »