David Farbey: What to ask managers when writing tech comms

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What can product development managers tell you that will help you as a technical writer to write clear, concise and useful support information? Leading tech comms expert David Farbey looks at the right questions for managers in the second of his series on ‘What to ask…’ analysts, managers and engineers

As a technical writer – of user guides, tutorials, online help systems, reference manuals, policy and procedure guides or other business document – you need to give your readers the answers they need so that they can use your company’s products to do their jobs. To get those answers, you need to ask the right questions of the right people. Easy, right?

Who to ask?

A typical product development team includes analysts and managers as well as engineers. We tend to group all these people together under the acronym SME (for Subject Matter Expert) as if analysts, managers and engineers are interchangeable, but that’s not true. Each of these people has a different function in the organisation, a different relationship with customers and clients, and a different view of the product and how it works.

Technical writers need to know which questions to address to which people. If you ask the wrong person, you not only damage your chances of getting a useful answer, but you may damage your credibility as a responsible member of the team.

Questions for managers

Development managers need to know where their team’s efforts belong in the overall product development plan, and need to be aware of timetables and dependencies between different features and modules. They should be able to tell you the big picture, but may well be less aware of the detailed requirements than the analyst, and usually they leave the details of product behaviour to their team members.

The questions you need to ask the manager are:

  • What is the formal name for this feature, and which project does it belong to?
  • What is the expected timetable for development, testing, and deployment?
  • Are there any dependencies between this feature and other existing or new features?

In agile software development, teams are supposed to be self-directing and so you won’t hear the term development manager but you may hear about the “scrum master” who is the person responsible for keeping teams on track, and so they would probably be able to answer management questions.

Using the answers you get

Understanding the different roles undertaken by different people in your development organisation should enable you to direct the right questions to the right people.

If you have made an effort to understand the subject domain, you should be on the way to establishing yourself as a valuable team member. That, of course, is only part of a technical writer’s role. Once you have gathered all your answers from your various sources, you can’t just type them up and declare that you’ve created a user manual.

The technical writer adds value to a development organisation by taking the raw information gathered from the different SMEs and transforming it into effective user assistance materials that support product end users in doing their jobs.

A good user manual, therefore, answers the user’s questions from the user’s point of view, but needs to be based on a deep understanding of the product, which is gained from background research and from asking the right people the right questions.

David Farbey, 2010. Check out the other posts in David’s ‘What to ask…’ series:

Want to know more about working in tech comms? Read our recent tech comms postings, or visit Candidate Services to find work in this field through Firehead, the leading recruitment specialist in Technical Communication, Web Content and IT Recruitment in Europe.

CJ Walker

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