Spend 80% of your time on One Thing.

As a manager of a small tech writing team in an agile environment (are there any large tech writing teams left out there?), it’s easy to lose myself in how-the-heck-can-we-keep-up-with-myriad-coders-frantically-coding thinking.

So when my manager scheduled a meeting to ask what innovations my team has planned for the next release or two, I thought of a few choice responses, such as “Um… how about documenting the new features in time for release? Is that innovative enough for ya?” and “Innovate THIS.”

Eventually I calmed down, since he’s the boss, and I have a mortgage.

I looked at the presentation I’d given after our last research period, that oh-so-short breathing time between releases. I reviewed the precious feedback we’ve gotten from a few customers and thought hard about it. I felt a bit better when I realized several of the goals we’d set for ourselves were already underway.

I dutifully wrote up a wiki page (because I can’t think without writing) that summarized a bunch of initiatives under each of our themes: process, community, quality, coverage, usability, and media. And I decided whether they’d fit into this release or the next. And I sent it off to my manager before our meeting.

He said OK, but where does all this get us?

He called my list depressing. Death by a thousand cuts.

He told me that to be successful, you need to put 80% of your time or money into one thing.

He suggested creating completely different help for just one tool. Throw out the old stuff and start over.

Once I played devil’s advocate for awhile, I began to see where he was going with this. I suggested a tool that I thought would be a good candidate. So I think we’ve picked our One Thing for this release.

Here’s how I’m thinking about our One Thing so far:

• Make sure everything the user needs to know is accessible from one place.
• Target two very different points of interacting with the help: the getting started phase and the troubleshooting phase.
• Use media that are best suited to the user and the information that needs to be conveyed.
• Make the help interesting, fun and effective. Grab and keep the user’s attention long enough to convey what needs to be understood. Defuse frustration.

And again (annoyingly), my manager is right; it’s much less daunting to try to make one thing better than to try to make everything better.

Now to persuade a few of the developers to star in our walk-through video….

The not-so-agile technical writer

I’m a technical writer who’s a big picture kind of person and that means agile development is sheer torture for me.

Going into my second agile project, I thought I would be able to go with the “flow” a bit more. I was wrong.

But, it’s important to point out that our documentation team hit all of our deadlines for new features, while substantially rewriting our help set and moving it to a wiki. I’m pleased with the outcome, but the trip was not pleasant.

This will be my first post in a series about technical writing in an agile environment. Today’s post outlines the obstacles that I face—aspects of being me (mostly). The next post will outline my coping mechanisms, as well as our team’s plan for our next project.

If there’s no follow-up post, that means that my unbridled honesty has gotten my keester kicked to the curb.

Waterfall nostalgia

I got started on this tech writing gig as a consultant. The product would be a month or two away from release, but mostly fleshed out and I’d swan in, grab the requirements documentation and the design specifications (sometimes I’d write those), play around with the tool and voilà: a manual. I could be very single minded about what I was writing and just get it done.

To be clear, I’m in no way saying that the waterfall method delivered better products or documentation, just that I had a better view of where we were going.

With agile, I feel like I’m jumping hither and yon doing all these minute tasks, with very little view of how they’re supposed to fit together. I’d often snarl to my manager after meetings that “I’m given a doorknob, a shingle and a shrub and told to go build a house with them.”

In fact, in his blog post about minimalist documentation and agile, Shannon Greywalker hits on my problem very accurately, and it’s this: “user stories are typically too granular” for minimalist documentation. Minimalist documentation, as he says, requires the “35,000 foot view”.

And what I want runs counter to the whole agile methodology: THE BIG PICTURE RIGHT NOW.

Multi-tasking versus uni-tasking

Another problem I face is that I’m a uni-tasker; I like to finish what I start—not doable when features span several development iterations and are in major flux.

There are blogs out there about what Generation Y is like, good or bad, but the one thing I do envy is their multi-tasking ability. These folks grew up doing homework, while downloading music and instant messaging their friends.

That’s the kind of splintered attention I envy. So, I got David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, but I couldn’t finish it. I read the line about having “a mind like water” and then froze. Uh-oh. Mind like ice. When I think of my work and personal to-do lists, I’m paralyzed.

So, I signed up for meditation classes and I’m now making another attempt to read Getting Things Done. I’m hoping it’ll help me switch directions faster. Not easy when you feel like the Titanic and need an hour’s notice to hang left. Now that I think about it, the Titanic is a career-limiting metaphor.

Procrastination

Now it’s time for confession. Our documentation department fought for and won a two-week offset for our last two projects. Yep, that’s right, we trailed development by a two-week iteration.  It’s amazing that we haven’t been rounded up and thrown in agile jail.

By procrastinating this way, we hoped that features would be more fleshed out before we started writing about them. It was our vain hope that this would contain some of the rewriting efforts. We still did a lot of rewriting, but this round we were rewriting a lot of material for the wiki anyway, so the offset didn’t matter that much.

By now, you’re probably thinking that it must be very hard being me. Don’t cry for me, Costa Rica; I have ways of getting by. Tune in whenever the next post surfaces to find out how I cope and how I hope to improve.

Our new documentation wiki is up and running!

For awhile it seemed like we’d never do it. We have a team white board that records our panic level, and for several weeks, the level was up around “hysterical” and “wanting to open my own daycare”.

We also have a white board in front of the doc area, in a hallway where everyone walks by to get to the kitchen.  At one point when we were particularly frustrated with MediaWiki, the topic was “names for the new doc wiki”. A few good suggestions:

the gaping maw, or "the wiki is never done"

And the best one, though we decided it would be unprofessional to make it official:

RTFW

Fortunately, when I was ready to throw in the towel, our IT guy stepped into the ring and beat MediaWiki into submission. He installed extension after extension, found a search engine that worked for us, and configured a great PDF creator. He moved the entire Wiki a few times to improve performance and security. And he was much more tolerant of the state of MediaWiki’s documentation than I was.

So, if you’re a small documentation team thinking of moving to a Wiki, what do you need to make it work?

• Someone outside the doc team needs to handle the technical side, so you still have time to do what you do best: write user documentation. In our case, besides IT, one of our senior developers ended up learning more than he probably wanted to about MediaWiki. He made the wiki the source for context-sensitive help for detected issues; each of these wiki pages allows you to switch from English to Japanese. Some of our users have no access to the internet, so he also wrote a script that exports the wiki to static html for packaging with Klocwork software.
• Read blog entries like Tom Johnson’s Ramping Up on MediaWiki to remind you that you’re doing the right thing.
• When the voices in your head whisper that it’s impossible to both switch your help delivery mechanism and reorganize/rewrite the entire help system in just a few months, take a pill or something.
• When your inner perfectionist rears its ugly head, repeat this mantra: The wiki is never done. The wiki is never done.

In the end, despite feeling like we were being drawn kicking and screaming into the gaping maw of hell, we love our wiki, and we hope our users will too. And users, if you don’t like it, you can change it!

I remember that idyllic summer day when I saw my very agile dog Maggie jumping through the sprinkler. I laughed until I cried. And then I thought:  This reminds me of what I do for a living.

Jumping into the Agile fray: a technical writer's perspective

I’m a technical writer and technical writing in an Agile environment is somewhat like chasing those water drops.

You can run after those features, but early in the game there’s not really anything to hold onto.

So, how does one document a feature that will probably change from one iteration (or day) to another without chasing one’s tail?

Workflow can be your rock in that ever-changing environment. While the feature is likely far from finalized, someone’s gotta have an idea of how people are going to interact with it.

The developers can get you started, but the workflow people (at least in my experience) are the product managers.

So, while my agile dog chases water drops, this technical writer chases product managers—and if I still don’t have enough of a big picture outline for the feature or a collection of features, then the Chief Technical Officer is in my sights.

For major features “in flux”, the best way to get “good enough” content to meet your iterative deadlines is to channel the Australian shepherd within and herd the developer, product managers and testers into a room with a whiteboard and a marker.

In half an hour, you’ll get something workable. And maybe a chance to put your two-cents’ worth into the design.

What if there’s no workflow available?

If it’s a sunny day, go find a sprinkler to jump through. These days, that’s a chilly prospect indeed.

Agile technical writing is a popular topic in the blogosphere (see Edwin Dawson’s recent three-part blog series). The user communication team at Klocwork is becoming more agile in fits and starts. In the last release, we joined our development team in using Xplanner, and found that it both reduced that horrible did-we-miss-something feeling and increased the visibility of our status.

In this release, we’ve resisted the urge to create a matching help story for every dev story. Instead, we create stories that allow us to focus on the highest-priority types of information: what’s new in this release, how the system works, how to get started, and how to use the tools day-to-day.

Our biggest struggle with Agile right now is how to stay on top of feature development while working on our own help-specific stories (like the current crazy-making idea of moving our help to a Wiki). Here are a few things we’ve learned along the agile way:

• “Just barely good enough” can mean documenting a feature only in the “What’s New” guide in an early iteration. This forces us to understand the “why” of a feature. It’s easier to ignore the “why” when you’re writing step-by-step procedures. Later, we’ll add information on getting started, a detailed how-to, and any necessary reference information.

• Workflow is king. If we don’t know how users will incorporate a tool into their environment and use it day-to-day, there’s no point writing a lot of words about which button to click when. So we push for details on workflow. And once a few customers provide feedback on a proposed workflow, the how-to starts to write itself.

We’re hoping these ideas will help us forge enough of a path through the agile doc frenzy to retain our sanity through the release.