I’ve noticed a trend lately in the role I play as a technical writer, but I’m not sure if the experience is common enough to be similar to other technical writers’ roles, or whether it’s just a role unique to my work. I have felt more and more that I’m becoming a “connector.” This is Continue Reading »
Download MP3 Length: 45 min. Powerpoint This podcast is a recording of the presentation I gave at the STC Currents conference titled “From Overlooked to Center Stage.” If you read the essay and then listen to the recording, you’ll notice some differences because (a) I can’t remember everything I wrote in the moment that I’m Continue Reading »
Story Now I have a confession to make. I really didn’t want to talk about roles and hats and value. I wanted to talk about story. But I didn’t want to talk about story directly. Instead, I wanted to illustrate it by structuring my entire presentation as a story. You’ve seen that with each of Continue Reading »
Epiphany: Cross Pollination Ultimately, what my colleagues had to say did have merit. There is a point that, in playing too many roles, you spread yourself too thin. You compromise your specialization and expertise as you step into unfamiliar territory. There is a limit to the number of roles you can play, and perhaps I Continue Reading »
Crisis Point: Problems with Multiple Roles As my attempt to fill the wiki role failed, I started to realize how busy I had become wearing all of these hats. It seemed that I was always logging bugs, answering phone calls or responding to emails, or attending this and that meeting, championing for a redesign of Continue Reading »
Catalyst 4: Wiki Manager As if I wasn’t already doing enough, I also started to wear another hat: wiki manager. It turns out I failed in this role, but I’ll still include it here because it segues into another topic I want to explore, which is spreading yourself too thin. At the beginning of this Continue Reading »
Catalyst 6: QA Testing As if I hadn’t already been wearing enough hats, participating in both design, support, training, and help, I soon started to wear another hat: quality assurance (QA). We use JIRA as our bug tracking tool. It’s mostly used by QA and developers to log bugs, enhancements, and user stories. I always Continue Reading »
Catalyst 2: User Experience We didn’t have a very good support model for the application. It became clear that our service desk, which included mostly BYU students working part-time and supporting over 100 different applications, couldn’t answer questions that users had. They would only escalate the questions to us. And not many of our customers Continue Reading »
Catalyst 1: Audiovisual Role With the instability of contract renewal pending and the lack of housing in the desert, I switched jobs to a non-profit organization, the LDS Church, which had an agile environment and about 600 IT employees and was growing rapidly. They had already been coding an application for about six months and Continue Reading »
The Yearning: Career Trajectory Although my chief interest in life is writing, more literary writing than technical writing, not surprisingly I wanted something more from my career. I wanted my career to be fulfilling and worthwhile. At this time, I had been blogging for a couple of years and had recorded dozens of podcasts. I Continue Reading »