Managing Writers

4 November 2009

Update on Reference Checking

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , — @ 12:06 pm

After complaining about a perceived lack of reference check calls, I received the second in a week, after a long dry spell. Probably not a trend, but it was heartening to see another company checking references.

The call brought up a few additional thoughts:

  • I’ve noticed that when someone who worked for me years ago needs a reference, I sometimes find it harder to remember the specific assignment than to remember how well he or she did the job. I know who I can give a good recommendation to, but once or twice, I’ve fumbled the supposedly “easy” question, “what did he/she do for you?” even when I knew without a doubt that he or she did a good job on the now-forgotten assignment.
  • The most recent call came from a company that does contract services in the IT area. While I’m not currently in the market for such services, the fact that they demonstrated at least a degree of due diligence in hiring is a plus that I would consider in evaluating the company for possible work.
  • The same company send a thank you note, which in addition to being a nice gesture, provided them with an opportunity to sell their services. It’s rare that an advertisement comes across as a plus, but I admire companies that recognize the importance of spreading a wide net, as long as they don’t overdo it.

28 October 2009

Checking References

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , — @ 4:14 pm

I just got a call asking for a reference for someone who worked in my group a few years ago. I was glad to give a reference, and happy that I could give this person a good one.

Surprisingly, this is the first call I’ve received to check a reference in over a year. During that same year, I’ve had half a dozen people ask me if I would be a reference, and in the years before, I’ve agreed to give references to many more. Some of those requests were generic, like: “if I need a reference would you give me one?” But others were clearly specific, with the company identified. Yet, this is the first time in ages that anyone has bothered to call me to check a reference.

In my book, Managing Writers, I stated that I only got called about half of the time. That’s clearly an overestimate at this point.

So why don’t more managers check references? Here’s my shot at enumerating the top reasons:

  • The applicant has obviously chosen references who will say good things, so why waste time listening to someone describe how wonderful the applicant is?
  • Once you’ve decided to hire someone, you just want to get on with things and not slow down the process.
  • You don’t want to take the chance of receiving information that conflicts with a decision you have already made.
  • The hiring process always seems to happen when you’re under pressure; you need someone right now, your “real” job is waiting, and you really don’t want to go out and find more people to interview if you unearth a problem with this person.

Regarding the first point, yes, you’re going to get someone that the applicant thinks will say good things about him or her. But, having called a lot of people to check references, I think it is still possible to learn important information, even from a “pre-screened” person. For example, you can check facts; what did the applicant work on? when did he or she work there? and so forth. In addition, you can often learn a lot from the way someone responds to questions. Even those who are restricted by their company to “name, rank, and serial number” answers may reveal their opinion in the way they respond.

The hiring manager I spoke with today didn’t ask anything out of the ordinary, and there was nothing out of the ordinary in my responses, but I think I made it clear that my evaluation of the candidate as an excellent technical writer was sincere and well-founded. I’m pretty sure that if I had thought otherwise, my meaning would have come through, even if I had used similar words.

The other three points, frankly, just add up to laziness. As strong as the urge may be to skip this step, there’s really no good reason for not calling references when you’re hiring. The call today took about five minutes, was cordial, and confirmed the likely perceptions of the caller. But, if it hadn’t, that one call could have saved him the trouble of hiring, and potentially firing, the wrong person. Since I like to call only when I’m ready to hire, it’s no more than a few phone calls about that one candidate. But if you don’t call, you are losing important information about one of the most important things you do as a manager (and one of the hardest things to undo).

6 October 2009

Does DITA Make You Dumb?

Filed under: Commentary, DITA — Tags: , , — @ 9:26 am

I had a twitter exchange a while back that got me thinking about DITA, structured writing, and the impact of tools on the perception of technical communicators.  The basic question was whether structured writing in general and DITA specifically are “dumbing down” technical communication, leading to a devaluation of the field.

I end up straddling the fence here. The short answer is “no, I don’t think DITA is dumbing down technical communication.” However, introduction of technologies like DITA, if not handled well, could lead to a devaluation of the field. The danger I see is that if managers misunderstand DITA and modular technology, they may conclude that DITA will allow them to hire less-experienced, less-skilled, and less-expensive writers, which could lead to a de facto dumbing down (or a train wreck, depending on your point of view).
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16 April 2009

Headed to DocTrain/DITA and STC Summit

Filed under: DocBook, DocTrain, Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — @ 12:44 pm

I will be at both the Society for Technical Communication (STC) Summit in Atlanta next month (May 2-6) and DocTrain/DITA in Indianapolis (June 2-5).

At the former, I will be talking about employee performance evaluation as part of a “Progression,” which is the conference version of speed dating. There are tables set up in a large room, with a presenter at each table. Each presenter has a topic related to the progression; in this case, the broad topic of the progression is management and my sub-topic is employee performance evaluation.

Attendees join whichever table has a topic of interest, then every 20 minutes or so, the moderator blows a whistle (metaphorically) and attendees move to another table. The progressions I’ve been to in the past were informal events where you could talk with presenter about pretty much anything related to their sub-topic (or not).

Should be fun; I plan to prepare a “checklist” for performance evaluation that attendees can take away with them, and I’ll be prepared to discuss whatever they are interested in. If you’ve read my book, Managing Writers or the excerpts published in the Managing Writers blog, you know I have strong opinions about the topic, which I’ll be glad to share with anyone who stops by my table.

DocTrain/DITA is a whole different game. I will give two presentations, DocBook in the 21st Century: Yes, Virginia, There is a DocBook, and it is Alive and Well, which talks about the latest version of DocBook, and Getting Started with DocBook, which is aimed at getting attendees up and running with the DocBook schema and stylesheets.

More information about the DocTrain/DITA conference and my talks at my personal blog.

24 March 2009

Podcast Interview about Managing Writers

Filed under: Book — Tags: , — rlhamilton @ 2:26 pm

Tom Johnson just posted a podcast of an interview with me at his website, http://idratherbewriting.com.

In the interview I talk about Managing Writers and answer Tom’s questions about the book.

Most of the discussion was about managing people, including questions about hiring, evaluating writing samples, motivation, planning, and lots more. If you are interested in the book, the interview is a good way to get more information about its content and about my approach to management.

Thanks, Tom, for taking the time to read the book (and it is clear from the interview that he did read the book in detail), and to speak with me about it.

4 March 2009

What Doc Managers Look for in a Résumé

Filed under: Book — Tags: , , , — rlhamilton @ 5:39 pm

Lately, a lot of technical communicators have found themselves updating their résumé for the first time in a long time. This prompted someone on the Techwr-l mailing list to ask hiring managers in the group what they look for in a résumé.

There are plenty of sources for information about how to write a résumé, but less on what doc managers are looking for. My book, Managing Writers: A Real World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation, contains a chapter that discusses hiring in detail. I have included an excerpt below that discusses how I evaluate a résumé.  I hope you find it useful.

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3 February 2009

Intelligent Content 2009: Day Two

Filed under: IntelligentContent2009 — Tags: , — rlhamilton @ 2:18 pm

My notes for the conference are sitting in Hertz’s lost and found (along with the very nice conference bag, which, unlike the bags given out at many conferences, was chosen by the organizers to be re-usable). So, rather than wait for Hertz to send them to me, I will wing it describing Day two.

In the life cycle of a technology, there is a moment when the discussion turns from technical nuts and bolts to useful applications. I think this conference was an early sign that for XML technology, as used for technical communication, that moment has come. You might say, “haven’t we been talking about applications for a long time?” and you would be right. However, too often the conversation has been dominated by technology and the cool stuff it can do, rather than opportunities to satisfy customer needs and contribute to an organization’s bottom line.

Day two’s talks focused on serving customer needs through information and moving technical communication from a “cost center” to a “profit center.” Bob Boiko got things started with a keynote that called on technical communicators to look at their content from a customer perspective, rather than an internal perspective. His point was most strongly made in his response to a question from the audience about how to deal with mandates from management to reduce costs. He turned the question around, pointing out that as long as technical communicators see themselves as a cost center, they put themselves in the position of having to continually shrink their budget. Instead, we should take the perspective of a profit center and look for ways to contribute to the bottom line. He conceded that this is hard to do, but that we need to move in that direction to remain viable.

Joe Gollner gave the featured presentation, which took a more historical perspective, starting from the earliest written information (on tablets). He carried that through to a view of the world with documents as the central “connector” that remains constant as the “device for communicating and retaining content as part of business transactions.” In his view, Intelligent Content is discoverable, processable, and informative, which makes it possible to create personalized documents and tailor content to customer needs.

Among the session tracks, I found the most interesting to be a session from James Michelson, who I also had the opportunity to speak with a couple of times during the day. His point, simple, but often ignored, is that everything a technical communicator does should be measured by how it contributes to a company’s bottom line.

His business is marketing, and his talk focused on how you can use even small amounts of information about customers or potential customers to create marketing that is much more likely to generate a response. At first, it seemed strange to have a marketer as a speaker at a conference for technical communicators, but in the end it made sense. Like it or not, technical information is part of your company’s marketing message, and therefore, it makes sense to tailor content for your customers, based on their interests and needs.

In his view, most companies focus way too much attention internally (85% in his view, which feels roughly accurate, though he did not back that number with hard data). He would reverse that number, paying 85% of your attention externally.

Overall, I took away several points from the conference:

  • Intelligent Content is more than just well-marked up content; it is really the combination of content, information about the potential consumers of that content, and processing that gives that user the greatest possible value from that content.
  • Technical communication as a discipline is too often relegated to being a cost center. To continue to be successful, the discipline needs to take charge of the value in its content and deliver that value in a way that contributes to the organization’s bottom line (that bottom line could be profit for a commercial entity, or some other value for a non-profit).
  • The prevailing current technology is XML, but the technology is less important than its application.
  • The application of technology needs to serve external needs; if it can’t be tied to an external need, then why should the organization spend money on it?

I found the conference to be valuable, and I hope The Rockley Group continues to sponsor it in coming years. I got a lot of interesting ideas, including the topic for my next book (more on that in future posts), from the conference, and I look forward to attending again in the future.

30 January 2009

Intelligent Content 2009: Day One

Filed under: Book — Tags: , — rlhamilton @ 12:12 am

I’m in Palm Springs attending Intelligent Content 2009, a very interesting conference hosted by The Rockley Group. The venue, Le Parker Meridien, is a very nice “boutique” hotel. The conference rooms are well set up and private, and the grounds are beautiful.

The conference started off with an introduction from Ann Rockley, whose company is the sponsor. Her objective is to provide a small, focused conference. To that end, her team worked with the speakers to make sure the talks were of high quality and focused on the objective. So far, most of what I have attended has done that. This entry will provide a few highlights from the first day of talks.

Salim Ismail gave the opening keynote. The question he addressed was “What makes content intelligent.” He defines intelligence as the ability to take patterns from one context and use them in another. In a sense, Intelligent Content boils down to the idea of using embedded information, along with information about the user (i.e., context), to deliver customized information. Although it wasn’t clear at that point, the rest of the day reinforced this as the central element of intelligent content.

Next up was Scott Abel, who provided examples, both good and bad, to illustrate the idea of intelligent content. His recent post on The Content Wrangler describes the “bad” in detail. Apple provided most of the “good” examples, with the central theme being that Apple uses all of the information available to the company about a customer to provide a personalized experience targeted at increasing sales. As always, Scott gave a spirited and informative talk.

This was followed by three parallel sessions. The first I attended described a system being developed for breastcancer.org, a site devoted to helping women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer and their families. Derek Olson and Ron Daniel discovered some interesting, and not immediately intuitive, things about personalization. The central problem they faced was how to gather accurate information from each user so they could select the most applicable information for that particular person. The obstacle was that users often incorrectly characterize the state of their illness, which makes it difficult to give them the right information. They built a flexible taxonomy, which helped considerably, but in the end, the most useful help to users was input from other users, who independently devised a reasonably standard way of describing the critical factors about their situation in signature lines. This ad hoc metadata helped users help themselves. Overall, a nice example of user created design.

Rober Lee, of Symantec, gave an excellent talk about optimizing search results. Unlike standard SEO, which seems to be primarily aimed at drawing the maximum number of hits, his objective is to analyze search results to make sure users get good answers for their searches. Here are a couple of key points:

  • Look at search logs
  • Look for top search terms
  • Test those terms (and look for terms that yield no results)
  • Optimize content, then re-test

Optimizing content involves getting the right content for the right search terms. Suggestions for doing this include placing search terms in titles, in the first 100 words of content, and in the filename. One counter-intuitive point is that minimalist writing might not be the most effective way to get search engine hits. Repetitive text early in the content, what he called “stupid text,” helps with this, even though it offends the best instincts of tech writer. Overall, an excellent talk.

There were a couple of other talks, but I needed to duck out early, though I did leave a copy of Managing Writers to be used as a door prize during the evening festivities.

More to follow tomorrow.

14 January 2009

Rewards and Performance Evaluations

Filed under: Book — Tags: — rlhamilton @ 9:16 pm

I just read a great article by Joel Spolsky, Thanks, No Thanks, at Inc.com. Spolsky examines the question of rewarding an employee for exceptional performance and finds it to be much more difficult than you would think at first blush.

There is a real dilemma to rewarding employees. If you don’t reward exceptional performance, you risk losing the employee, but if you do, pretty much everyone will be unhappy. The employee is likely to think the reward is smaller than he or she considers fair, and peers are likely to think it is too large or undeserved compared to their own performance. (That’s one reason companies tend to keep salaries and bonuses confidential).

There is a similar problem when it comes to performance evaluation. Most companies (at least the large ones) like to assign every employee a rating (you know, categories like: exceeds objectives, meets objectives, meets some objectives, and the dreaded needs improvement). However, unlike salaries and bonuses, when you rate employees, by definition you give them enough information to know where they stand.

For those in the top category there’s no problem, they are almost always happy. Those in the bottom category get a strong message, though it should be a message that is no surprise (if you are doing your job as a manager).

The problem is for everyone in between; at best their rating is a no-op, at worst, it is a strong de-motivator. Quite possibly, they will come away with the idea that they should have been rated higher. It’s also likely they will have no clear idea of how to improve their rating (you can give them all sorts of suggestions, but they will know they’ve got to claw their way past at least some of the folks in the higher categories, so just doing better is not a guarantee of a higher rating).

To make things worse, most companies severely restrict the number of people you can put in that top category. Therefore, as many as 90% of your team may live in limbo between the top and bottom.

I discussed this problem in one of the most troublesome to write chapters in Managing Writers. This chapter was previewed in a four part posting (The full chapter begins here, but Part 4 is where I discuss the pathologies of rating and ranking; beware that this particular chapter was significantly re-written between the preview and the book, but the section on problems with rating and ranking is still pertinent).

However, don’t expect too much from the book or from Spolsky’s excellent article; the truth is that rewarding employees, whether through bonuses or the normal PE process, is one of those intractable problems that you really can’t fully solve. You will sometimes over-reward and sometimes under-reward (there is no “perfect” reward; read Spolsky’s article if you don’t believe that), and whichever you do, you will make someone unhappy. The best you can do is strive for fairness and avoid placing too much emphasis on external rewards; you will be much better off in the long run if your team is internally motivated.

Shameless plug: the Performance Evaluation chapter in Managing Writers goes into this topic in depth and is much improved over the previewed version.

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