Lately, there has been an interesting discussion about whether technical communicators shall consider organizational centric tasks and/or product centric tasks when writing end user assistance. The discussions are found here http://idratherbewriting.com/2011/12/26/using-tags-to-increase-findability/#comments and http://everypageispageone.com/2012/01/09/are-docs-a-responsibility-or-a-business-asset/. I will clarify my view in this blog post, but first some words about the process change taking place in our domain.

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Have you lost control over which topic versions belongs to which product releases? Is the same type of information floating around in many different topics in the CMS? If the answer is yes, this is the blog post for you, since it suggest a solution, based on almost 15 years of modular documentation experience, for effective release management.

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Have you reflected on what type of information you include in a manual? Meaning, for whom are you designing and writing? Your manual(s) contains certain type of information, but who needs the information, when, to do what? This blog post tries to sort it all out. Read it to find out what type of technical communicator you are.

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It is time to conclude on the purpose of my blog. What am I trying to say? What do I want to accomplish? What benefits will my blog bring to my readers? Well, read this blog post to find out.

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As a technical communicator, you often start by categorize users into user groups where each user groups is given a name, for example Network engineer, System administrator, Operator etc. To make the user group come alive, you develop personas to represent each user group. But how do you, as a technical communicator, actually develop user groups and personas? And how do you determine what type of information to write and how to classify and organize information in deliverables based on a set of personas?

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