Leadership in Technical Writing
Leadership in technical writing is a key aspect of writing great documentation. You need to effectively organize work of every member of your technical writing team so that all tasks will be done on time. But how to be a good leader? I’ll tell you some tips on mastering technical writing leadership.
Assigning Tasks
The hardest part of the technical writing process is assigning tasks because you need to know the strengths and weaknesses of every member of your team. For example, one writer is more comfortable with writing content, while another has a flare for photos (yes, photos are also used in documentation, read the article called Photos in Technical Documentation to learn more about it). So, assign tasks to the staff wisely.
Manage Documentation Readiness
Every team member has their work mode — someone can carry out tasks fast while another person may fail to fulfill their own responsibilities. So, reports showing the documentation readiness are great for this purpose.
As I use ClickHelp, it’s easy to manage documentation readiness. It has internal analytics that allows you to learn how many words were added by an author, who is the top contributor, how many topics are ready and so on. For example, let’s examine the project readiness report (I got screenshots from ClickHelp online help), it’s easy to estimate whether it’s going according to your plan or not.
In this situation, Sophia is a bottleneck, she didn’t do a review on time, so, maybe, it’s a sign that you should assign review tasks to one more person from your team to help her.
I strongly recommend that you use statistics for your documentation writing process.
Collaboration
Effective technical writing is about collaborating with your coworkers, but keep in mind no one likes attending too many meetings. However, it’s hard to say how to organize meetings right not to annoy your team; the approach to staying in touch with everyone involved in the project depends on your company’s culture.
Feedback
When the work is done, you should not forget about it. It’s time for collaboration with your users. In order to improve your content, you need to examine feedback — analyze comments on your topics and statistics. If your tool has the comment system (Disqus, for example) integration, that’s cool. You can be in touch with your users all the time because it’s easy for them to comment on a topic and not write an email.
It will be a great boost for improving not only documentation but also the work process in general. For example, if some topics were written not as good as you expected and gathered many negative comments. Well, maybe, this tech writer has other strengths that you don’t know, and you will need to reconsider assigning tasks in the future.
Conclusion
So, being a real leader demands great efforts, you should be confident, patient, creative, also you should know your team well. However, I hope my article helps you and gives you the main idea of leadership in technical writing.
How did I become a technical writer? What skills do you need? Read FAQ on Technical Writing.
