What a day in the life of a Technical Writer in the energy industry looks like -- Guest post by Bonnie Denham
What a day in the life of a Technical Writer in the energy industry looks like
At 9 am, I arrive at the client’s office, dock my laptop, and open up Outlook to check for new email. One second later, the new team member that’s just transferred back from Australia pops into my office. Except it’s actually a cubicle. But it’s a big cubicle. He asks how to book a conference room in an Outlook meeting invite and checks my screen, scanning my Outlook ribbon for anything that stands out as different from his. I explain that the room-booking tool is a plug-in that he needs to download, and I recommend that he also download the Outlook plug-ins for MS OneNote and MS Teams.
Back to reviewing new emails, I notice that there’s a new one in the “External” folder that everyone in the company was mandated to create, along with the Outlook rule that sends every email originating from outside the company into this External folder so that potential phishing attempts are more easily identified.
Next, I open MS Teams and look for new chatter from any of the several international projects I support. Soon, one team will be ready for me to edit and format a group of documents going out for review by the leadership. I’ll have to ensure to incorporate all “global changes” they agreed to going back to the start of the project, such as adding a space before and after a slash mark “/”, ensuring that they used “Conceptual Site Model” instead of “Site Conceptual Model,” among many other things.
Then, I open MS OneNote, select the notebook I share with my supervisor, and click the “Find Tags” button to pull together a list of to-dos assigned to me from various knowledge management efforts. I check Workplace® by Facebook to see if there are any new people requesting access to one of our four Communities of Practice (CoPs). I find two new requests. I look up their titles to make sure they have a business need to join, approve their requests, add them to an email distribution list, and then add them to a list of members on the CoP’s SharePoint site.
Finally, I pick up where I left off yesterday, processing and analyzing a year’s worth of data that was collected from the CoP SharePoint sites: who visited and which pages they visited, whether or not they were a member of any CoP, which business units and countries they were from, what content they downloaded, among other technical data. My supervisor wants to measure the effectiveness of the CoPs in their mission to connect people and content. He says, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Currently, my dataset is in MS Excel. It began as a data-dump all run together on a single tab. Yikes! Thankfully, with macros and formulas inside of formulas, I can split out the data very quickly. I import the spreadsheet into Microsoft’s Power BI app which makes analyzing the data a breeze. In a month, the CoPs will be migrated to SharePoint Online where we will be able to audit data like this much easier, and without Excel.
Speaking of data migration, I remember that the OneNote notebook I share with my supervisor is still sitting on a shared drive. It’s time to take the leap into full cloud computing by migrating this last item. My supervisor has been hesitant to try it sooner. I migrate the files to our SharePoint Online site and update the sync location in OneNote. Presto! My supervisor says, for probably the hundredth time, that he owes me pizza. I have still never received a piece of pizza. I happily look over the three notebooks I have open in OneNote — the shared one that is now coming in from SharePoint Online, a second that is linked to my OneDrive, and a third that comes in through an external Office365 cloud that I use for personal notes. It feels good to be linked and synced, especially when I can get all this information on the go using the OneNote app on my smartphone.
Around 11am my manager swings by and asks if I have time to clean up a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). “Of course,” I reply. The answer will never be “no.” The cleanup involves putting the content into a standard company template, editing for the usual suspects, and ensuring clarity of message, consistency, and organization. I ask when he needs it back. “Can you have it done by early next week sometime?” (It’s only Monday.) This type of response always pulls at my heartstrings and makes me wonder about any bad experiences he’s had with Technical Writers in the past. “I’ll get it back to you later today,” I reply. His facial expression of a weight being lifted is all the thanks I need, despite promises of pizza.
After lunch I meet with someone I call the “SharePoint guru.” He’s got ALL the permissions. I work with him to add a form to a SharePoint wiki page I created for one of the projects I support. When someone fills out the form, different workflows will be triggered based on the form submitter’s selections. We automate some of the fields to save form submitters time, for example their name and the date of the submittal. Notification emails with hyperlinks will get sent to the appropriate reviewer, with a confirmation email sent to the submitter. Efficiency, and especially automation, make me happy. After some testing, the form is ready for use.
When I get back to my desk, I have a new email waiting. A manager in one of the California offices has asked me to upload a bunch of that team’s files to SharePoint Online. I drop the files into the corresponding project and use “Quick Edit” to quickly and easily add metadata to all of the files at once. With Quick Edit, applying metadata (“document properties”) is as easy as dragging the contents of a cell down, just like in Excel, to apply to others in a column or row. I let the manager know that I’m done. “How do you do that so fast?” he asks. “Practice,” I reply. Leveraging technology and knowing intricate, time-saving processes in programs contribute to how this is really done.
Around 1pm I start editing and formatting the SOP. I send it back to the author around 3pm, and pick back up where I left off processing, analyzing, and summarizing (translating to meaningful information) analytics from our CoP sites. An hour later I get a knock on my cube and look up to see a team member from down the hall. He asks to show me something on his computer that he’s trying to do with an asset inventory in Excel. He shows me, and I quickly determine that he wants to use a data validation (this is a fancy term for a drop-down list). I show him the steps, but then let him know that he can simply shoot the file over to me and I’ll get the sheet fixed up for him. On my way back to my desk, I hear another shout for help coming from my manager’s office. In this case it’s an actual office, but with glass doors. “Technical Writer to the rescue!” I exclaim upon arrival. He laughed. (Thankfully).
An important takeaway from describing my day is that a Technical Writer can have a significant impact on a team’s efficiency and effectiveness by simply being present — to assist with software and process questions and to facilitate the use of time-saving technology. This keeps teams on track and allows them to focus on the core business.
-by Bonnie Denham,
About Bonnie Denham
Bonnie Denham has been a Technical Writer in the energy industry for over 20 years and has been responsible for hiring Technical Writers for energy industry clients for over 13 years. She started her own business, 6Figure TechWriter, to train driven Technical Writers on the skills, competencies, mindset, and expectations required to be set up for success in a higher-paying role in the energy industry so they can reach their career and life goals sooner. Follow her on LinkedIn or visit her website for more information.