Advice on new job?

Subject: Advice on new job?
From: Geoff Hart <Geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 09:11:01 -0400

Karen Field has <<...just accepted a very exciting
opportunity... I'll be their first and only tech writer, at least for
awhile... Any advice...? ... In this company, the engineers
have been doing all the documentation, so I want to tread
carefully and yet help everyone understand that I'm there to
help them.>>

First thing you should do is find yourself a mentor, preferably
someone who can look on your situation from the outside
(i.e., not your manager and not the engineering manager).
This is the person who'll teach you corporate politics (the
things they don't mention in the employee handbook) and
give you an idea of the nature of the people and corporate
culture you'll be dealing with. Next, talk to your manager and
get a feel for how well the company supports the doc process
(i.e., how much support you'll have, and whether you can
work to establish policies or must simply live with the ones
already in place). Finally, sit down with the engineering
manager and get a feel for how this person operates: you
need to establish a good working relationship with this person
right from the start, because with them on your side, life will
be so much easier. If it's going to be a difficult relationship, at
least you'll have advance warning and know what toes not to
step on. Make sure you also take the time to meet the
engineers and begin building working relationships. The
hardest thing may be convincing them that you're there to
make their lives easier, not replacing them because they're
incompetent writers. Make sure you do a little detective work
(e.g., spot the science fiction novels piled on the corner of a
desk) so you can start establishing points of non-work
contact. If you're lucky, you'll build friendships on top of
professional relationships, but if not, showing a little interest
in the people rather than the position will earn you tons of
credit you can draw on later.

Now comes the hard part: juggle this information until you
have a good feel for your new place in the universe. You may
have the ability to make and implement policy, or you may
have a long, slow slog to gain enough respect to begin
implementing gradual change. Either way, you'll know what
your strategy must be. If you're interested in more specific
details, I've got an article entitled "Nurturing new employees"
(unless Maurice modified the title) coming out in the
Sept./Oct. issue of STC's _Intercom_ that gives more details;
if you can't wait, contact me directly and I'll send you the pre-
editing version as a Word97 document.

<<any advice on developing documentation (printed and
online) for Web-based applications?>>

Yup. Since you're brand new at the company, you've got an
unparalleled opportunity to learn about your audience.
Explain that you really can't do the best possible job without
knowing what the audience needs (thus, what you must do to
fulfill those needs), and get some support for contacting the
audience and finding out what your documentation strategy
should be. Other than that, the underlying principles of
documentation (e.g., clarity, suitability for the reader's needs)
are the same for any medium, and it's just the details that
vary; drop us a line periodically with specific questions,
because there's a myriad of details that vary.

--Geoff Hart @8^{)} Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"Perhaps there is something deep and profound behind all those sevens,
something just calling out for us to discover it. But I
suspect that it is only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence." George
Miller, "The Magical Number Seven" (1956)

From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=


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