Key Concept Archive

Using Checklists to Increase Consistency and Productivity in Communications Tasks

Anyone writing, editing, or managing any type of communications for a living is feeling the crunch. There is less time to create and edit; more types and formats of content; more apps, software, and systems to learn. And we expect quality, accuracy, and consistency from ourselves because we take pride…

Building a Style Guide from the Ground Up

How do you establish a style guide, and how do you keep it going? In this session, I’ll talk about my experience implementing and maintaining a corporate style guide. What started as a casual department guide for 25 tech writers is now a formal style guide for all content creators…

Add Super Power to Your Communication with Super Structures

Super structures can increase performance and boost your productivity. They take advantage of economies of scale in your routine communication without causing you to succumb to numbing uniformity. Say what?! Super structures are logic flows that help you evaluate and create communications better and faster. Carry these structures with you…

Writing (Non-Agile) Business Requirements

Writing requirements requires the ability to write clearly, concisely, and succinctly so others can design, develop, and test the product. This session covers 8 characteristics of writing a good requirement, reviews 4 steps to requirements gathering, and concludes with 17 tips for writing good requirements. Come and learn how to…

Collaboration – Love it or Hate it?

This month I wanted to find out if you have come to love or hate collaboration in any of it’s forms.  I’m a big experimenter which often means I’m a big collaborator. In January’s TC Dojo, we had Karl Klashinsky do a session on Git, the open source software version…

What You Need to Know about Agile and Techcomm

When working in an agile environment, technical writers can face some challenges in planning, workload balancing, and execution. But writers can realize numerous benefits in this environment if they follow a few principles to stay flexible and fully engaged on their project teams. This session provides the top five things…

Best Practices for Arbortext Workspaces in Windchill

Arbortext Monster Garage, Season 3: Arbortext TC Dojo, Episode 10 Using workspaces in Arbortext Content Manager (or Windchill) can be a bit confusing. How do you keep it clean? When should you create one? How long should you keep a workspace? How do you know which one to us (if…

Creating a Documentation Plan

“Proper prior planning prevents poor performance.” Creating a good documentation plan will help you identify what you’re going to do and can be a valuable political document if the project shifts from under you. Docplans are even more important in a world where you have distributed teams and fragmented documents…

Collaborative Writing in Distributed Teams

This session had a lot of votes, so we found John Hedtke, Master of Remote Collaboration, and found a time when he can come talk John’s last book was written with a co-author on the other side of the country that he’s seen exactly twice, but he’s always worked with…

How do authors find content for reuse?

Your customers can find content, but can your content creation team? DITA content explodes. How do you manage it? A lot of customers have been asking us recently about how they’re going to manage content that explodes into lots and lots of little topics and content fragments. Authors wonder if…