English lessons
posted by Sarah
I'm at London's Heathrow airport, getting ready to return home. Many thanks to the organizers of the STC UK and X-Pubs events for wonderful hospitality (special thanks to Ant Davey who picked me up at the airport when I arrived at 6:30 in the morning).

Some observations about my week in the UK:

• During conference sessions, you can expect that participants will not ask any questions until the end of the session.
• Questions are often quite pointed, far more so than in the U.S. I've noticed this on the BBC news as well. The question is phrased politely, but the general paraphrase is something like, "Well, that's all very nice, but isn't it true that blah completely undermines what you are saying?" For instance, you might get a question like, "You're really pushing for XML here, but isn't it true that XML isn't actually applicable for many situations?" Um. (Incidentally, participants in Germany frequently challenge the presenter as well. Not that there's anything wrong with that...)
• There is no such thing as a "British" accent. I heard an unbelievably variety of different accents and inflections, including Irish, Northern Irish, Scottish, northern England, southern England. The natives here can place accents with remarkable accuracy. And let's not forget variations from the non-native speakers, such as Germans and eastern European. It's quite fascinating, and for me, at least, some accents are much harder to understand than others. In particular, I found that long sentences were much easier to understand than a quick question. As a result, I was constantly asking service personnel to repeat themselves (they tend to ask short questions like, "checking in?").
• The X-Pubs attendees were mostly men, not too surprising with the emphasis on the defense (defence) industry and aerospace. But quite a different demographic from STC.
  
• There's been recent discussion about the relative lack of blogging or twittering at STC, but at these events, there was none (except for me). With wireless access clocking in at around $30 per day, it's not that surprising.
• The current exchange rate is really, really, really painful.

I had some very interesting discussions with participants at both events, ate a lot of great food, and had a generally wonderful time.

Labels: conferences, presentations, stc2008, xpubs

4:26 AM Permalink | |

 
STC UK...almost live, part 2...Managing change
posted by Sarah
Ant Davey, Rail Standards Safety Board (RSSB)

Another excellent session. Ant provided a discussion of change management with quite a lot of references to more detailed resources.

Knowledge is being lost.
Information has value.
Web is changing search methods and expectations.
Web is changing ability to contribute and review content.

Findable information requires chunking.
Chunks are potentially reusable.
Ultimately, you have single sourcing.
Not "how we have always done it."

Chunking requires modular and collaborative writing.
Not "how we have always done it."

Single sourcing @ RSSB
* Still finding our way
* Technology led (in part)
* Starting to introduce standard templates
* Paving the way by communicating
* Planning an XML pilot

Change management
* Linking people and processes toward a desired change
* change is not where you are now
* need to know where you are going and tell those who you want to come with you
* "you are almost certainly under-communicating by a factor of at least 10 and possibly 100"

Carrying people with you. People view change as an attack on their current competence. Need to begin by celebrating what they have been doing right. 5-25% of people can't or won't be able to work with the new processes (Emma Hamer)

The change equation:

C = (ABD) > X

C = change
A = dissatisfaction with status quo
B = desirability of the new end state
D = risk and disruption to get there
X = cost of changing (effort, discomfort, difficulty, risk)

Carrying people with you
* celebration with is working
* explain what isn't and why
* describe how it will be with the new methods
* what's in it for them
* what's in it for the company
* what's in it for the clients

WIIFM = What's in it for me

* Active supporters
* Active dissenters
* Passive supporters
* Passive dissenters

Creating a change team
* You can't do all this by yourself.
* Special skills, talents, and leadership
* Where you can't carry, you may have to push or reallocate

First, Break All the Rules
Marcus Buckingham

Leadership is different from management. (That is SO true.)

Team members
* Champion or sponsor
* sustaining sponsor
* implementer
* change agent
* advocate

* group
* different styles, methods, and needs
* different personality types
* similar team gets quick results
* team with differences gets better result

Where change management goes wrong
* too much complacency
* lack of power in the guiding team
* not having real vision
* under-communicating (effectively)
* allowing obstacles to block the vision
* no short-term wins
* declaring victory too soon
* not embedding changes in practice

learning cycle
* concrete experience for activists
* reflective observation for reflectors
* theoretical concepts for theorist
* practical experimentation for pragmatists
(Experiential Learning, Kolb)

change
* needs leadership and vision
* needs good management
* needs metrics
* because ultimately it's about money
* increase revenue
* decrease costs
* make people's lives easier
* concentrate on the outcomes
* leave individuals to develop their own implementation plans

business process re-engineering
Customer led analysis method for business re-engineering
1. establish the scope
2. target the customer
3. model the process
4. analyze the structure
5. create the opportunity
6. redesign the process
7. refine the customer experience
8. ??

Why?
* customers dissatisfied
* position in value chain changes
* move from product to service or vice versa
* merger with another organization
* has to be customer-led
* good business case
* beware of targets (wrong targets lead to undesired behavior)

Influencing others
* getting results with authority
* you can't change other people
* you can change what you do, which may change how others react to you
* need to be politically savvy

Effective influence
* open
* honesty
* integrity
* loyalty
* rapport

* adult to adult communication and relationships
* maximal listening
* dovetailing needs outcomes

Strategies
* Logic
* Personal appeal
* Networking
* Bargaining
* Assertiveness
* Hierarchical appeal

Great presentation, and happy to see that my anecdotal experience has some amount of overlap with Ant's much more research-backed approach.

Labels: change management, stc2008, xml

6:51 AM Permalink | |

 
STC UK: Almost live, part one...Lessons on Introducing XML Publishing
posted by Sarah
[updated to correct number of employees]

I attended STC UK's Trends in Technical Communication this weekend. For once, I actually got to be a regular participant in the sessions. And I got to vote on chapter-related matters (as I joined it this year).

Shannon Milsom of Cambridge Silicon Radio delivered an excellent overview of their XML implementation and lessons learned.

When she joined the company eight years ago, she was employee number 69; CSR now employees 4,000 people and 1,000 in the UK1,000 people. They create chips for Bluetooth (market leader), wireless, GPS, and other radio technologies. Most of their customer base is in Asia.

Development is in the UK and UK; "fabless" manufacturing in East Asia. Sales everywhere.

Their original workflow used Word and had all the usual problems you might expect. Styles were corrupt and style guides were not followed. As the company grew, the problems became worse. Single sourcing was needed for shared content; the copy and paste approach led to a risk of missing changes. Content from SMEs needed heavy editing and fixes of bad Word usage -- they created their own individual styles and made a huge mess -- and that assumes that they actually used the official template.

They had a wide range of content, and they classified it by product status (which is interesting and I don't think I've ever seen before):

• Advance information
• Pre-production information
• Production information

Side note: A slide with the various contributors and roles includes an excellent graphic of the software guy as a hippie California dude with a tie-dyed shirt. Sales and marketing on the beach under the umbrella with a laptop.

Their goal was to have:

• Content re-use
• Cost-effective translation
• Version control
• Reviewing

In addition to The Usual, their reasons for moving to XML include the ability to substitute "common text," such as the product name and number, document type, and document status.

Modular authoring results in a workflow where they build documents from common blocks. If a block has been "released" (I think this means reviewed and approved), it can be used as needed.

Benefits they see from XML:

• Shorter production cycle
• Do more with small staff
• Increase throughput
• Marketing can build documents from signed-off information modules
• Use data direct from source (SMEs)
• Ease checking and sign-off
• Has taken human confrontation out of review cycles...approved modules are set in stone and it's easier to reject change requests on those modules
• educe composition and review time
• Version control
• Automated system reduces errors -- nothing falls through the cracks
• Cost-effective language translation...partial localization to save money over localizing everything
  

They considered building their own CMS but eventually bought. After a few trials and a false start with a product that didn't work, they ended up with Ovidius TCToolbox, which they are very happy with.

Lessons learned

• Understanding XML technologies is much more interesting than working in Word and not that difficult
• Choosing freeware, shareware, purchase, or DIY is a big decision
  
• Be sure to choose a mature, well-supported system
• May have to re-invent corporate style to accommodate XML publishing [or face huge costs in replicating existing style]
• Glossary is generated based on terms actually used in the document and pulls content from a 700-entry master glossary
• Solution is still changing
• Beware of solutions that are not fully supported
• Evaluate service vendors by looking at real-world implementations that they have done.
  

Issues to consider

• New way of working
• Will your tech comm group work this way?
• Can you recruit people who can work this way?
• Keeping a single voice in a single-sourced system
• Learning how to write in XML for content re-use
• Writing for one voice helps translation
• Editor/GUI is important to success
• Getting content directly from SMEs
• Budget

Focus on:

• Good training/support and actual solution
• Involve authors in the setup of data and design
• Designate information architect for CMS-based solution
• Identify the skills gap
• Test drive the software
• Focus on your needs and examine the existing process
• Do you need a CMS? What about a staged approach?
• Can you create output, symbols, graphics, equations, xrefs?
• Be prepared to make diversions from original corporate style
• Hidden/rising costs?
• Allow time

Involve...

• Everyone on the journey
• Team for evaluation
• IT system support
• Info architect
• Contributors/reviewers
• Tech communicators

Today's language lesson: "trial" as a verb, as in "We trialled XYZ, but didn't like it."

Labels: change management, conferences, stc2008

4:52 PM Permalink | |

 
Conference showdown
posted by Sarah
Tom Johnson's post about the STC conference has sparked a lot of great discussion. You should read it and the comments if you haven't already.

All done?

It seems that the STC conference is getting mixed reviews, and people's experiences seem to diverge quite a bit. The reports from DocTrain West (Vancouver, May) and WritersUA (Portland, March) are much more positive.

Why is this? What makes the STC conference so easy to criticize? Are the
other conferences that much better?

Personal versus impersonal

With 1200 attendees, STC is much larger than either DocTrain (200ish) or WritersUA (500ish). Both DocTrain and WritersUA have well-known organizers -- Scott Abel and Joe Welinske, respectively. Their personal styles couldn't be more different, but they are both well-respected for their events. For STC, there is a Program Committee, an STC staff, and STC leadership. It's much easier to criticize a committee or a collection of committees than an individual.

That said, I think that STC is making some mistakes in their conference planning.

What is the target audience?

The audience for WritersUA is "user assistance professionals." The audience for DocTrain is "people interested in learning about the latest tools, processes, and technologies for technical communicators."

For STC?

STC is an individual membership organization dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences of technical communication. It is the largest organization of its type in the world. Its 14,000 members include technical writers and editors, content developers, documentation specialists, technical illustrators, instructional designers, academics, information architects, usability and human factors professionals, visual designers, Web designers and developers, and translators -- anyone whose work makes technical information available to those who need it.

Wow, that's a mouthful. More importantly, that's a really big, diverse group of people. What happens when you try to put together a conference that serves all of them?

In a comment on Tom's post, I wrote:

One major challenge for STC’s conference is the breadth of topic coverage that’s required. You and I are interested in different things than the academics who are members of STC. Thus, you’ll find entire conference tracks that are targeted toward “others.”

Lindsey Robbins responded:

I totally disagree with trying to focus on academics and professional stuff. Academics have a lot of other organizations and conferences they can attend and STC sorry to say didn’t rank up there with my options when I was in grad school. I think it’s important for academics to influence the industry but its presence at the conference isn’t as important for a track. I really think STC as a whole should focus more on the professional side and development from entry level to experienced.

What is the purpose of the STC conference?

If you said "to advance the knowledge of technical communicators," you win the prize for the most politically correct answer. I think the actual correct answer is, "to bring in significant profits that let STC balance its budget." That is, the conference event is supposed to be profitable and sustainable, but it's also supposed to help sustain the STC itself.

There's also the answer, "to provide a venue for the STC to meet and conduct its annual business" -- the honors banquet, the annual meeting, leadership day, and other activities needed to keep the Society as a whole moving.

I assume that DocTrain and WritersUA are profitable, so why are we offended by STC's desire to do the same for their conference?

I think that the mission of the STC conference is to serve the needs of STC as an organization -- and that's different from serving attendees. Serving attendees one of many priorities.

Infrastructure

You've probably already seen complaints about the lack of wireless connectivity in the Philadelphia Convention Center. There was actually free Wi-Fi, but it was only available in some of the meeting rooms. The trade show floor had Wi-Fi @ $100 per day. I think not.

Unlike Certain Other Conferences, vendors don't get any sort of lunch provided. I was not feeling the love. And since we (as vendors) pay a lot more to get into STC than we do to participate at either DocTrain or WritersUA, I sort of expected some semblance of love or an attempt to at least fake it. The vendor location, which we immediately dubbed "Siberia" (with apologies to any readers from there!), was Not Convenient to attendees. I wonder how many people completely skipped the trade show?

The conference schedule itself was problematic -- others have complained about the lack of advanced topics and about the lack of information about topics. Where was the grid schedule? The session search was annoying. For me, it was broken -- searching on "O'Keefe" didn't bring up my sessions. I resorted to searching on "Sarah" or on the (known) titles of my presentations to figure out when I was presenting. Kind of a problem for people who a) were looking for my presentations (obviously, a cast of thousands...), b) didn't think to search by first name (!), and c) didn't already know the title of the presentation they were looking for.

The opening session on Monday had too many STC business announcements. Either shorten these or move them to Sunday evening. After the opening session, there was a two-hour break intended to drive traffic to the vendors. Starting a conference with a two-hour break is weird. Schedule is for when people are getting tired, like mid-day on Tuesday. They don't need a break immediately after the opening session. That just invites attendees to skip Monday morning.

Speaker issues

As a speaker, I should probably stay away from this one. And I got to attend very few sessions during STC -- I was in Booth Jail. I will point out that my percentile rank at STC is typically much higher than my percentile rank at WritersUA. In other words, assuming that my presentations are of equal quality, the overall speaker quality at WritersUA is higher than at STC.

I gave one presentation on the last day of the conference at 11:30 a.m. Several people told me that they wanted to attend but had to leave to catch a plane. I'm certainly guilty of leaving conferences early myself, but in addition to the not-great time slot, I was presenting at the same time as Ginny Redish and Jared Spool. Ouch. Might I recommend that the program committee try to avoid putting highly rated speakers in concurrent time slots?

Content

The STC call for proposals is ridiculously early relative to the conference -- and it's better than it used to be. It's impossible to do bleeding edge presentations with 9 months of lead time required for the proposals.

STC used to provide speakers with a $75 or $100 discount off the conference (and a requirement to register in order to present!). This policy has changed; speakers are given free admittance, but the perception problem lingers. Andrea Carrero writes on the STC Forum on June 11, 2008:

As a speaker in 2006, I got $75 off of one day's registration costs for the conference. Perhaps if the monetary reward were a little better (say, the day you speak you get registration--for the day--for free), perhaps more people would apply and there would be a larger selection of topics.

The review process for proposals is opaque; if a proposal is turned down, you get a form letter that offers no useful information. I can think of numerous reasons to decline a proposal that have little or nothing to do with the proposal quality. For example:

• Sessions on this topics didn't draw people the previous year.
  
• Another speaker submitted on the same topic and only one could be accepted.
• The speaker had one proposal accepted, so the second proposal was declined to make room for a wider variety of speakers.
  

Instead, STC sends out a form letter that implies that the rejection is the speaker's fault, and recommends areas for general improvement, such as a more compelling topic or putting more effort into the proposal document.

Again, let's compare Scott and Joe's approaches -- they look for specific topics, they discuss the topics with potential presenters, and they look closely at the feedback from previous years when deciding which speakers to accept. (Oh, and if you'd like get on the speaker blacklist, my recommendation is to cancel at the last minute because "I'm busy." They HATE that.) This process is clearly less objective than the proposal-with-review-committee approach, but I think that they are less concerned about objectivity and more concerned with putting together a compelling conference.

Social events

Many of the social events at STC were tied up with The Society. I attended the honors banquet this year for the first time in, well, ever. (I was one of 12 new associate fellows. Sorry to bite the hand that, uh, honors me.) Actually, the banquet was kind of fun. There's something deeply surreal about seeing my tech comm buddies playing dress-up. (Yes, I wore a dress. Shut. Up.)

But Tom makes a rather valid point about the need for social events that work for the attendees at large.

Also, as others have said, the band was too loud. The value of the conference, for me, is in networking, and that's hard to do when you can't hear each other.

A delicate point about attendees

The STC audience seems, on average, to be much older than the audience at DocTrain. WritersUA is somewhere in the middle.

I don't think this bodes well for STC down the road.

Why aren't there more non-U.S. attendees?

I can think of a few:

• Distance, obviously. It's a long way from Europe or Asia to the U.S. for a conference. The TCWorld conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, may be an easier trip.
• U.S. passport and border controls are an issue. Some visitors are offended by the fingerprinting program (all non-U.S. citizens are fingerprinted when they enter the U.S.). I am offended on their behalf, but there's not a whole lot I can do about it.
  
• Language barrier. Attendees who speak English as a second language may find a certain lack of consideration for non-native English speakers. I try to be careful about this in "international" venues, but I'm afraid that I don't consider the STC conference to be particularly international. That said, I think the first two questions I got after my presentation this year were in excellent, but accented, English, so I'll pay attention next year.
• Culture barrier. The STC conference is very American. Not just English-speaking.
  

I met some very interesting people at the conference, had some great side discussions out in the halls, and reconnected with my conference buddies. I'll be back next year assuming this post doesn't get me banned.

For the record, I have offered to help STC evaluate proposals this year. (And have done so once or twice before.) No idea whether they'll take me up on that or not.

(Thanks to Alan Houser, who contributed ideas to this blog.)

Labels: conferences, stc2008

10:41 AM Permalink | |

 
STC 2008: Wrap-up
posted by Sarah

My next round of conferences will be in the UK. I'm leading an XSL workshop for STC UK on June 22 and giving a presentation on June 21 as part of the Trends in Technical Communication event. Then, it's onward to X-Pubs, where I'll be discussing the implications of Web 2.0 on technical communication.

As far as I know, after that I'm done with the conference circuit until the fall. However, senior technical consultant Simon Bate will be attending the Gilbane conference in San Francisco and participating on a DITA panel. Please contact us if you'd like to set up a meeting at the conference.

Labels: change management, conferences, stc2008, xml

1:44 PM Permalink | |

 
STC 2008: Unifying Content Development and Localization at Palm
posted by Sarah
[Update: I forgot to identify the presenter, Jane Faraola of Palm.]

(Palm is a client of ours.)

The problem Palm faced was outright hostility between content development and localization. The origin of this was conflict because of late-breaking changes after the "declared" UI freeze. The content hand-off to localization might have to be repeated up to eight times after repeated UI freezes.

Things had to change -- meetings were contentious and localization said at one point that they
"wanted to break our fingers."

Timeline...

1/06 initiative kickoff
conferences, vendor demos

3/07 reorganization joined UA and localization services

investigate
big change, big impact
* adopt structure authoring, possibly a new toolset
* consider DITA
* select and implement a CMS
* select and implement TMS
* add staff to handle add'l workload
* select and implement a hosted PM tool

small change, big impact
* adopt structure authoring
* select and implement a translation management system
* select and implement a hosted PM tool

Challenges
* resistance from authoring staff
* lack of IT support
* product dev times with no room for error
* limited budget

They chose...small change, big impact
* structure authoring/FrameMaker 8
* adopt XSLT for conversion
* implement TMS

tried CMS pilot, but figured a year to implement
didn't think CMS space was fully mature
FM/DITA had issues with tables, indexing
XML not the greatest tool for publishing printed doc
Palm timelines do not allow time to fail

head-to-head competition between LionBridge and SDL for TM tools

moved to str FrameMaker
October 07 loc tool

initial metrics
* FM7 to FM8 in less than two months
Success!
* TMS up and running in less than 5 weeks
6 months with a lot of hiccups
* lower overall authoring, DTP and conversion costs
Not yet. Authoring and DTP costs are holding steady, conversion costs are down.
* reduce loc timelines
Not yet. Only three months in, but optimistic

Rising requirements for localization...
2006 - 17% of deliverables in non-English
2007 - 30%
2008 - 35%

Integrating content dev and localization is a cost-effective approach to creating the highest quality multilingual deliverables

Active project management from both teams

Headaches

* more email
* more process
* continuous change
* pressure to "not touch the doc"
* defining ownership on a product

What's still needed?
* effective tools to simplify localization
* simplify processes
* create great content for local markets instead of "just localize"

new mission statement
empower users worldwide to successfully incorporate stuff

English development versus localization staff = 1-to-1 ratio

SDL TMS is workflow automation. manages translation memory. very customized workflow.

Interesting overview of an organizational change that was needed to be more effective.

Labels: conferences, stc2008

9:27 AM Permalink | |

 
STC 2008: Blog round-up and some initial impressions
posted by Sarah
I attended a bit of the opening session, but then got sucked into BoothLand and never got out into any sessions today.

But never fear, for there are quite a few other places to get STC conference coverage this year. We have:

Twitter: Follow the #stc2008 tag at twemes.com

Tom Johnson notes that Twitter participation is abysmally low at under 1%. I was excited because there was any at all. I guess my expectations are lower than his.

Tom has also posted his notes from his panel on marketing in a Web 2.0 world.

I'm not finding much blog coverage of the conference. I find that disappointing. I found a few people who said that they are at the conference and will be blogging, but no conference content just yet.

There are two group blogs at ScribbleLive here and here.

A few tidbits on the STC wiki.

Scott Abel has posted his slide deck for Augmenting Your Technical Documentation with User-Generated Content.


The Managing Technical Documentation blog has a writeup of the opening panel.

Based on a highly unscientific survey of a few fellow consultants and business owners, the economy is not directly affecting our business. Most everyone is extremely busy.

Adobe announced Acrobat 9 today. I don't have any useful assessment of that tool just yet, but I think it's worth noting that the Adobe booth had up-to-date graphics showing Acrobat 9 as part of the Tech Comm Suite version 1.3. (Did I mention that my standards are low?)

Tomorrow (Tuesday), I'm doing two panels:

• Getting Inside Information on Collaboration, 10:30 a.m., Room 112AB. In this panel, moderated by Char James-Tanny, my focus will be on building team culture across geographical and cultural boundaries.
  


• What is Structured Authoring?, 1:30 p.m., Room 103A. Expect to see a quip-laden discussion between Alan Houser, Neil Perlin, and me about our respective definitions of "structured authoring" and why each of the others is wrong. (Neil and I did a session together at another conference that we labeled the "XML Death Match." The official title was something so boring I've forgotten it. After I referred to Neil as the Time Life operator earlier today (in my defense, he was wearing a headset for a live demo), I expect serious trouble. Wish me luck, although of course I deserve any revenge he might dish out.

Tuesday evening is the honors banquet, where new associate fellows (like me!) and fellows will be...inducted? hazed? I'm not really sure, but check back on Wednesday and I'll let you know about the whole thing. Except for the secret handshake.

Oops. (Can you be kicked out before induction?)

Wednesday at 10:30 a.m., I'm doing my last session, Paradigm Shifts are Never Pretty. Drop by to see my highly scientific Taxonomy of Problem Writers.

Labels: conferences, stc2008

11:38 PM Permalink | |