Is your work going well?
I never miss an opportunity to write an essay so I did:
Yes, work is going very well.
When I was meeting with a team on Tuesday and talking about the work I do, I (finally!) articulated why I like it here so much. After 20ish years of writing software documentation and debating the topics the 5 of us would have about “the best way’ to do our work – do we put a screenshot in a drop-down, do we include screenshots at all, do we draw on the screenshots, do we write about multiple ‘things’ on a single page or do we split them each into a separate page, (and everything else), that is really not my role here. Each team has a set of documents that they would use in a disaster recovery situation and my primary role is to accumulate each team’s documents / files into the same directory structure on the network so that I can then generate and then publish the department’s comprehensive disaster recovery documentation. As I told a team I met with on Tuesday, if I see a procedure in your document and you have it as a bulleted list when it really is a procedure that should be numbered steps, I’m going to change it to numbered steps. If I see a Word document that is “Normal” style with manual formatting, I’m going to apply styles to it so that RoboHelp will know how it is to translate the Word styles to CSS styles. But as far as what actual content needs to be in the Word file(s), that’s up to the individual teams. They can decide whether they need a screenshot or not, whether they need to include a warning or a note or a caution or an Important piece of text – the content is totally up to them. If I am reviewing a document and something doesn’t make sense, of course, yes, I’ll ask but more for my own understanding than anything else. In fact, one of the first managers I worked with sent an inquiry she received about disaster recovery documentation to me. She ‘gets’ my role and what I am trying to do.
And, slowly, I’m establishing my credibility to others I don’t directly work with. To summarize, there is a central internal website where ‘knowledge’ is to be stored for the department. I heard about how there are now going to be ‘tips’ sent out in a daily email so I talked to the co-worker who is coordinating all of that. I said, ‘if the website is to be where we are accumulating ‘knowledge’ about ‘things’, it doesn’t really make sense to include that ‘knowledge’ as a tip in an email. If I want to go back and look at one of these tips, in the future, I will have to look through emails to find it. If those tips were created as part of the website, whose purpose it is to accumulate ‘knowledge’, I think it would be easier to find that information in the future.” The co-worker was receptive to my idea and it’s too early to say whether it will be actually done that way. I also mentioned this conversation to my manager and he seemed impressed that I was looking at the big picture (providing a central place to go to for ‘knowledge’) instead of the small picture (‘we need to send out a daily tip in the daily email’). I look forward to seeing what ends up happening with it.
Thus, when I see a job ad like the one below, I can definitely say, "Nope, I'm not going anywhere!"
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