Will Kelly. 7 Ways to Sell Agile to Project StakeholdersWhether you’re making the move to Agile project management in your development group or creating an Agile process for your in-house project management methodology, chances are you’re going to have to sell this change to executives in your organization. And, they’re going to be business people too. This means you have to have a really strong business case, no matter how logical and even obvious switching to an Agile system might be.
Source: How to Sell Agile Project Management | LiquidPlanner High on the list of other projects I’m pursuing since leaving CNET TechRepublic is trying to regain some of my personal time back. Reclaiming some of my personal time means: Finding a hobby of some sort because so much of my life has been writing, eating, going to the gym, and sleepingWorking on my houseCatching my breath My slow down will probably last as long as I feel good about it. Have you reclaimed time for yourself this year?
Read More → "That" Doesn't Go Without Saying | Content Rules, Inc. (Guest post by Marcia Riefer Johnston) Photo by Wendy Hood I’ve been thinking about that. T-h-a-t. A handier word you’ll never find. Yet English speakers often omit it. That is left out. Suppressing that doesn’t necessarily get you in trouble. Still, even following nouns, consider keeping your thats out in the open, especially if you write for those wonder workers we call translators or for people who struggle with English. When it comes to verbs, though, don’t let that go without saying.
Verify the software has been updated.Ensure your valuables are locked up.The manager doubted the new hire would have any trouble learning the CMS. Did you notice the missing cues? Verify the software … [Verify what? Only after your eyes have moved past the noun—software, valuables, new hire—do you realize that you’ve been misled. Verify [that] the software has been updated.Ensure [that] your valuables are locked up.The manager doubted [that] the new hire would have any trouble learning the CMS.
Blog | Intext Writing. Now You Too Can Write Like Hemingway! Hemingway is a new web app that helps you write content that’s simple and clear – just like Ernest Hemingway’s trademark style! Read more What Are You Forgetting to Tell Your Customers? What’s wrong with these instructions? There’s something missing—a key piece of information. Why Are You Boring Your Customers? You want your customers to be glad they used your user guide, right? User Manual Fail: This Beard Trimmer Doesn’t Make the Cut I recently got a new beard trimmer.
Why Disney Believes Your Product Instructions Should Be Perfect Disney knows that a disappointing touchpoint creates a disappointed customer. Fixing the Foibles of STEM Professionals: A Review of The Brainiac Paradox Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals are widely acknowledged as the brightest and best in terms of intellect and raw brain power. Stop Hiding Your Product from Your Customers Want to increase your product’s visibility? Blog. In working through the idea of minimum viable content, I decided to build out a hierarchy of content needs based on Maslow’s hierarchy. In Maslow’s pyramid, the basic needs (like food and water) are on the bottom. If you don’t have the basics, you’re unlikely to be interested in the top layer (self-actualization). What happens if you look at content needs? Scriptorium hierarchy of content needs The bottom three layers are what’s required for minimum viable content.
This hierarchy helps us with content strategy work. Available Available content means that information exists, and the person who needs it has access to it. The first step in meeting content needs is to make the information available to people who need it. In the available category, we also look at whether content is findable, searchable, and discoverable—if readers can’t successfully locate the content they need, it exists, but it’s not really available to the readers. Accurate Content should be accurate. Appropriate Connected. I'd Rather Be Writing.
Beyond Help | Ben Minson's Technical Communication Blog. STC’s Notebook. Bill Swallow: techcomm and more. Group Wellesley, Inc. | Technical Communication Tools, Technologies, and Best Practices. Every Page is Page One | Readers can enter anywhere. Is your content ready to receive them? JustWriteClick. Technical Authors Blog | On clear and simple information your users will love.
Many software companies, when they start out, provide user documentation as downloadable PDFs or as web pages. As they develop more products and versions, and as they expand into countries that use different English spellings, the amount of documents can grow until it becomes hard to keep all of these documents up to date.
It’s at this point that they tend to call a specialist technical writing company (such as Cherryleaf) to see if they can fix the problem for them. We find they’ve usually had a brief look at a Help Authoring tool, such as Flare or RoboHelp, and can see that it would solve a lot of their problems. However, they’re often not really sure how to use these tools in the best way. Although topic-based authoring has been around for over twenty years, for many people it’s a completely new concept. It is, to quote from either Hamlet or Star Trek VI, an undiscovered country.