When asked yesterday at the Fortune Brainstorm tech conference whether the infamous scene in 'The Social Network' where he dismisses the Winkevoss twins' claim that Mark Zuckerberg broke the Harvard Code of Conduct, former Harvard president Larry Summers responded,glibly?"One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o'clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they're looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case."
All right. so I?m talking here with Larry Kunz from North Carolina at the STC Summit. So, Larry, what are you presenting on tomorrow? Well I?m going to be speaking from the perspective of a project manager about some trends that are affecting our profession I teach a project management class to a certificate program to students at Duke University and for years I?ve told them that in my thirty- year career the basic process for technical documentation hasn?t changed. In the last couple of years I realized that that?s not true anymore There have been some very fundamental changes to the process brought on by things such as collaborative authoring, user-generated content, agile programming, which we see a lot of in the software industry and from a project manager?s standpoint it?s can be scary at first to see these things because we teach about carefully crafting a plan at the very beginning and this is your doc plan and it?s absolutely sacred and you go forward with it and it?s a long project life cycle and all of these things go out the window with these new trends and what I?ll be talking about here at the summit is what a project manager can do about those and how, in fact, it?s not as scary as they might look and how we can come up with some techniques So you mentioned what a project manager might do so I is your audience technical writers who are also project managers or people who just need to interact with them more? How do you see that focus on project management fitting a tech writer audience? Technical writers often do project management ? sometimes on their own projects so that I think taking what you said about technical writers who are also project managers but I think it would have a lot of value for technical writers who work with project managers who may be asked to do things differently than they did before and to give them some insight into why that?s happening. So how has You mentioned Agile as one of these catalysts of change the whole dynamic how has that happened what does Agile do that?s different now? Well Agile, I like to think it is as just in time development. First of all it?s based on user stories and customer requirements which ought to be very good news too technical communicators who have been talking about doing audience analysis for years. It?s right up our alley and we as technical communicators have a lot to contribute to the process. But, secondly, if we?re used to those long I mean long in terms of time monolithic product life cycles where we started with a doc plan and nine months later we knocked out a set of manuals and online helps that won?t fly in Agile Agile is based on much shorter maybe month-long cycles and at the end of any of those the product developers can elect to ship the product to the customers if it?s the right time and if it meets the customer requirements and we as tech writers need to be able to, likewise, to publish So from a project manager?s perspective how are they viewing a tech writer who?s involved in this Agile process? Is there just more pressure on a tech writer to deliver or is there more pressure on the project manager? I mean? It?s not so much pressure as a different orientation. The tech writer used to be responsible in the way old days for writing a certain booklet, say you write the user?s guide and nine months later I expect you to produce the user?s guide. Today we?re going to ask the writers to develop topics We?re talking about structured authoring, maybe DITA. or some other topic-based approach where a group of writers would produce different pieces that are assembled together in ways that we can?t predict right now. So a writer no longer feels that sense of ownership, this is my user?s guide. The writer needs to write topics that will be amassed with other writers? topics and it will have to look appropriate together it?s a different orientation. So you?re saying that that this Agile method almost requires technical writers to adopt this topic-based approach rather than crafting a full documentation set themselves it?s more of a collaborative it almost propels people toward the collaborative model? That?s a good statement the other thing it does is the amount of content they?re working with is probably more tightly confined. Agile has iterations or sprints where the product developers work on one or two specific features rather than the whole product. And likewise the writers are going to be writing about one or two specific features rather than the entire product We need to get used to doing that a feature at a time where in the past they wouldn?t work that way. Well what are some of the other things that?ve changed besides Agile that you might mention Well, we have user-generated content really coming into the fore and it?s so new we?re still learning the best practices. I may interject here that I hope my conference session will be as, certainly not containing all the answers, but be the catalyst for discussion searching among the whole profession as to what the best practices are. Using-generated content, again, I?m a project manager and I have my documentation plan that was sacrosanct that doesn?t accomodate the idea of user-generated content users are writing blogs and articles other feedback usually from the Web that are really good information about how to use the product and that other users consider to be at least as authoritative as the quote unquote official stuff. My project plan has to accomodate that and find a way to package it with all of the other content within the content management sphere, content strategy? So if you have writers who have adopted DITA in order to collaborate together on a project and you have users who are generating content that?s probably not in a DITA format how do you mesh the two together? We need to find a way to make them harmonious. I?ve seen DITA wiki and I?m not sure that?s the answer but it?s certainly a good attempt What is DITA wiki? DITA wiki is a wiki based way of generating DITA content. I?m afraid I don?t know enough about it to describe it better than that but I think it?s an honest effort to give the users a way to input content that?s easy for them that will encourage them to actually do it And yet when it arrives at the content strategist?s desk, or the content manager?s desk, or wherever, it?s not so completely out from left field it?s totally incompatible in terms of format and style. That someone can actually integrate it with the information Is that like ditawiki.org or com, or is it the concept of a DITA wiki? It?s a concept of a DITA wiki. I think, IBM?s involved. Again we?er getting into areas I don?t know that much about, but if you Google DITA wiki, you?ll find it. So what? is there any other thing besides user-generated content Agile methodology, that are new forces in this whole project management tech writing production? There are others, but those are the two I?m planning to focus on and and very interestingly they are very similar to each other in the effects they basically have on our lives. They?re not two separate talks that I?m combining into one but they?re a lot the same I think the best practices we adopt in response to those are in many cases overlapping, if not identical. So you?re kind of approaching a lot of things from the project manager?s perspective and tech writers we often don?t see that perspective or we don?t see things from their perspective. What?s the project manager?s perspective of the technical writer in a project Well, the technical writer has to produce work that?s pretty much the way the project manager sees almost anything. Everyone has to produce something. But, are the tech writers last on the project manager?s mind? I mean, the project manager usually focuses on the UI and? I?m glad you mentioned that, I?m thinking of the project manager who?s specifically manages the documentation project, but I?m really glad you made that distinction I was making an assumption because there is often a big overall project manager and as the documentation project manager I have to make sure that that person understands the importance of our role. And, by the way, I think that Agile and Web 2.0 help us make our case especially because Agile, as I say, is based on user stories which is very much like the audience analysis that we are comfortable doing. So I Larry, tell me what?s your specialty when you?re at work, you?re a project manager of tech comm, is that right? That?s right, I do other things: I write some content, I do a little information architect architecture In fact, I recently got some new business cards and I had to stop and think what to put on there. I ended up putting project manager. So if you could give one piece of advice to people in that role, who are managing big tech comm projects, what would it be given all these new things Agile and user-generated content, what?s the one thing they really focus on be successful Well embrace them, don?t be afraid of them one of the things I plan to share in my session is that first I was skeptical about Agile. I was afraid that I couldn?t get my writers to make the adjustment fast enough. So even though the development team was working in Agile, I tried to have our writing team work the traditional format and there?s a pretty good Bible metaphor about putting new wine into old wine skins; it just doesn?t work So embrace the new things and understand that in many ways they?re good for our profession and are compatible with the kinds of things that we?ve been saying for years. Technical communicators are strong at. And really try to be as collaborative with the product developers as you can. Again, Agile really emphasizes the small team aspect to which the technical writer is a key part. I think we should be very, not only open to that, but we should really support it wholeheartedly. Alright, Larry, well thanks for talking to me. Again this is Larry Kunz at the STC Sumit Thank you, Tom, it?s been a pleasure.
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