The role of documentation teams is changing fast. Here’s what we think should be on every documentation manager’s strategic agenda. 1. Increase your visibility Visibility is about communicating status to stakeholders. It’s easier than ever to create dashboards that show content coverage, freshness, and usage, so there’s little excuse not to. If people can’t see… Read more »
Category: management
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 »
Is your documentation process full of waste? There’s an app for that
Catch a Technical Author on the wrong day, and you hear them complain about spending hours tracking down a Subject Matter Expert who’s perpetually in meetings, or having to rewrite the same section three times because the source information kept changing. In a manufacturing environment, you’d see them as symptoms of waste in the process:… Read more »
Short guide – A plan for improving outdated help documentation
We’ve added a short guide to our website: A plan for improving outdated help documentation, Let’s be honest: there’s a good chance the help documentation for your product or service is probably out of date. Before you feel defensive, know that you’re in good company. Most software vendors struggle with the same problem. Documentation has… Read more »
Podcast 129: Your first 90 days as a Documentation Manager
We asked on Social Media: Someone joins as/becomes a manager of technical writing team. What would you advise they do in their first 90-100 days? In this podcast episode, we go through the responses we received. Transcript This is the Cherryleaf Podcast. Hello and welcome again to the Cherryleaf Podcast I’m Ellis Pratt, one… Read more »