Setting a marketing strategy for a Technical Publications Dept

A good Technical Publications manager will, naturally, set a strategy for their department. In addition to the HR, technical and project management aspects, there’s another factor to consider – the marketing strategy for the department. Sales consultant Richard White advises businesses define and describe the archetypes for their particular product or service. He means the… Read more »

Turning employees’ knowledge into an asset for the organisation

In July 2010, Mark Prisk, UK Minister of State for Business and Enterprise said: As the events of the past two years have made painfully clear, we must leave behind the over reliance on financial services and support a renewal in modern manufacturing, so we are able to grasp the huge opportunities of the low carbon age…. Read more »

Building intelligence into business documents

Often business documents, such as sales proposals and annual reports, are a joint effort between various people and departments. It involves collaborative writing and incorporating existing content. For printable documents, this collaboration can make it really difficult to maintain a consistent level of quality, writing style and “look and feel”. For Technical Communicators, there’s an… Read more »

Creating more engaged users

As part of my prep for my presentation on user documentation as a more emotional experience for the user, I revisited this presentation by Kathy Sierra. This hasn’t ‘made the cut’ into my presentation due to lack of time, so I thought I’d post it here.

Getting the balance right between hotline support and user documentation

Many organisations find it hard to know how much time, money and effort to put into supporting their users. There’s a competition, of sorts, between the Technical Support and Technical Publications departments over how much budget they should receive. In some organisations, these departments are also competing, in a way, with content generated by users… Read more »