Today’s post in this month’s series of guest posts is by Swapnil Ogale, a contract technical writer residing in Australia. I follow Swapnil on social media, and find his insights and experiences of the Australian technical writing community interesting and informative. I am so glad he’s here to give us a deeper insight into the Australian Tech Comm culture. Here’s Swapnil’s post:
When Amruta contacted me a couple of weeks back for this guest post, I wasn’t sure how to approach this. As a Technical Writer who contracts, I am often working a couple of jobs most of the days. In addition, I also organise the Write the Docs Australia meetups across a few cities, so I am constantly looking for speakers and thinking of topics that would interest the attendees.
If you are in the fortunate position of working on exciting projects simultaneously, here are some of my experiences on how you could make it work.
The Early Bird
I like starting early (around 5.30am), because the peace and quiet (and a fresh cup of chai) helps me focus into getting a mental list of tasks ready. Often, early in the mornings, I like reading through my Slack channels to get a sense of the conversations that have happened overnight. Some days, it could just be reviewers getting back to me with feedback, whereas some days it could the developers talking about bug fixes or designers prototyping new interfaces.
This short early morning ritual helps me schedule and priortise work for later in the day.
Public transport, social media, opportunities
My workplace (day job) is a 45 min ride and 2 train connections away. I usually catch up on documentation news via Twitter, looking for tips, hints and any other interesting chats around documentation. I also initiated the Write the Docs Australia meetups a couple of years back, so I follow up on potential speakers, conversations and other themes around this.
I also use this time to search for projects needing documentation or potential consulting opportunities and Twitter surprisingly provides a lot of interesting material for this.
Process documentation
At my last workplace, work hours were pretty flexible, and since I was already up early, I got into work before the rest of my team did (around 7.30 am). For the last couple of years, I was documenting processes for a number of internal teams. Process documentation is not unlike product documentation, but it is slightly more chaotic. While product or software documentation is reliant on periodic changes (such as sprints or releases), process documentation is driven by continuous changes to the processes. These changes come about due to refinement or improvement to existing processes.
I spent a few minutes to understand these process changes, compare them with existing processes and update or create new documentation (work instructions, quick reference guides). We used Confluence to create documentation and JIRA and Trello to track our projects.
Plan, design and innovate
Along with process changes, I also spent time looking at our existing documentation and making improvements to make the content more useful, readable and reusable. If there was something that I really needed to focus on without distractions, I use the Pomodoro timer.
If the documentation changes required talking to the engineers or operators, I would set up one-on-one meetings to source this information and/or review the documentation.
Work from home afternoons
The flexibility at work made it possible for me to head home mid-afternoon (for my son’s school bus pick up) and work from home for the afternoon. I would usually schedule any meetings in the afternoon, usually done via Skype.
Spending time away from the desk, also gave me a chance to catch up on emails or requests for changes to the content without any interruptions.
Moonlight hours
In addition to my regular day job as a Tech Writer, I also work part time on documentation projects remotely. Most nights, I usually work a couple of hours, planning, creating or curating content for software applications. These projects could be local (Australian) or anywhere across US, UK, Europe or Asia.
I currently document online help, release notes and other content for a project management tool for architects and engineering firms.
I use a range of tools to plan (Trello, JIRA, Mindmaps),create (Madcap Flare, Zendesk, Confluence, Google Docs), and curate (JIRA, Slack) for my projects, depending on the customers need and setup.
Working in Australia
Over the last 12 years, I have been lucky to work in some terrific Australian born and bred organisations across a range of industries. A lot of organisations reflect the same kind of multicultural mix that is now a large part of the nation. This provides some great opportunities to work with, understand and collaborate a range of thoughts, ideas and beliefs.
The work culture also largely reflects the core Australian values of mateship, fair go and a sense of integrity. While Technical Writing is not a new concept here, I’ve found, in my contracting experience, that it still not fully understood and lacks the same amount of support from management resultantly. The value of a technical writer or what they bring to the table is still a bit unclear. Also, a large number of companies are still reluctant to support remote working due to various reasons. From my own personal experience, Australia is still a few years behind in catching up with the tools and technologies that can be adopted to make documentation an entirely fulfilling experience, both for the writers and the users alike.
