Creating franchise operations manuals that are customisable and controlled

Creating an operations manual is a key part of franchising any business, as it helps ensure each franchisee is operating in the way that made the original, franchised, business successful in the first place. You want reliable, repeatable, consistent performance from every franchised location. However, it’s often the case that there needs to be slight… Read more »

Writing user documentation collaboratively in an Agile environment

Hi, You provide wonderful newsletters full of useful information. Thank you. I’m a Senior Technical Writer in a small company, and I have one contractor working for me. We have come up against a challenge. <snip>… My team currently uses RoboHelp, which is not a collaborative, team tool for writing. The company likes to think… 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 »

Find, Follow, Finesse, Feed: The future for technical authors?

A number of commentators have suggested that, in the near future, content curation will play a key role in technical communication. As more content is generated by users, there needs to be someone who manage this content and ensure users will be able to find the right information. Techcrunch has just reported on how YouTube is dealing with… Read more »

Trends in technical documentation – Is technical writing broken?

Cherryleaf and Ovidius are in the early stages of organising a free seminar for the technical communication community at the Møller Centre in Cambridge. The themes for the event are likely to be future trends in technical authoring, and related to this, is technical writing broken? We’re liaising with the ISTC’s Cambridge area group on… Read more »