Argument for Agile Tech Writing

A tech writing team for 21st century software development—whether an in-house tech writer, freelance writer, or independent contractor—needs to adopt the same spirit, structure and methodologies of an Agile software development team. Each writer needs to live by the basic tenets of Agile development: (1) Interact directly with customers and developers to support and communicate with all stakeholders, (2) Use tactics that work rather than straining against established protocols and layered processes, and (3) React quickly to changes. These processes are in contrast to the overly planned and scripted practices of past writing methods.

Traditional Writing Expectations

A traditional writer waits for a product team to finish their coding and testing, and then acts as scribe to perfunctorily write resulting products and features. They do not engage in PRD planning, assist in providing skills for UI development, or immerse in customer issues at the their level. They seem to think they only have a single responsibility in the team to handle help files and react only to explicit complaints. Consequently, traditional tech writers are either limited to a simple project or fail when asked to handle multiple responsibilities.

If not immersed into the product team with agile writing methodologies, the traditional tech writer is most likely living a frenetic, reactive life of waiting to get laid off, or meeting seemingly endless deadlines with maximum stress. Adopting processes that identify application features, identify and get feedback from audiences, set milestones for delivery, and provide replicable processes, should be welcomed warmly by today’s tech writer, especially those with so many balls in the air and growing responsibilities.

The Agile Tech Writer

Tech writing is most effective when the writer knows conceptually why the new feature or product is needed in the market and how it is going to be used. This is what agile methodologies provide. These writers go beyond simple reference identification to expand information to assist the user in understanding the value and utility of the software product.

An agile tech writer, like an agile dev team, is part of the whole planning, development, and support processes. The agile tech engineer and writer understands everyone’s responsibilities, knows the product as a whole, and meets the myriad of communication requirements along the product lifecycle from a variety of stakeholders.

An Agile tech writer

Understands customer practices across vertical industries.
Engages throughout the product lifecycle to provide internal communication and documentation early to stakeholders and to capture content to frontload their own research needs. This releases engineers and PMs to focus on their jobs. Everybody wins through new efficiencies, common information, and expanded writing services.
Provides right-brain communication from within a predominantly left-brained engineering organization. They embed themselves as chief communicator for all internal and external needs, expanding roles to include technical journeyman, real-time author, curator of content, and publishing strategist.
Iterates through each writing cycle to improve products and processes with each delivery.

Like agile software developers, the agile tech writer needs to rely on interaction with key individuals rather than to rely on perfunctory processes and never-used planning tools. They need to embed within the dev teams to understand team goals and changing product features, requests, and opportunities. They value best practices from the customer perspective over detailing product features with reference data and obvious help files. They do not see their jobs as scribes with specific writing assignments during release phase, but rather champions of communication and collaboration throughout the lifecycle of the product. A task never completed until the software is obsolete.

The agile tech writer goes beyond help systems and release notes into a comprehensive role as tech info coordinator, documentation writer, and curator of product information all wrapped into one. In my mind, this is an Agile Tech Writer with skills to support API’s, generate in-depth articles, manage formal documentation, and integrate own writing with social and cloud resources—and to publish on the web, to the KB, or any other format using object-oriented writing techniques. They identify overall product inconsistencies, initiate needed conversations, challenge dev and PM from another perspective, and generate articles from their team relationships for formal doc and other publications across the KB, company and cloud.

Agile software development methodology is based on customer input and quick reaction to meet customer needs and opportunities. It structures resources to meet specific business needs and puts it on a calendar, providing milestones and requiring goals to be met. It also requires customer interaction from all members, and backend processes and tools to get more efficient and scale to meet targeted and vertical needs. For the tech writer, support protocols that meet all these goals would allow the writer to touch all points of communication and publish required doc across the enterprise.

Agile tech writers provide internal communication and documentation early to stakeholders and capture content to frontload their own research needs, thereby releasing engineers and PMs to focus on their jobs. Everybody wins through new efficiencies and expanded expertise.
Agile tech writers provide right-brain communication from within a predominantly left-brained engineering organization. They embed themselves as chief communicator for all internal and external needs, expanding roles to include technical journeyman, real-time author, curator of content, and publishing strategist.
Agile tech writers for the 21st Century need to be the right brain communicator in an overwhelming left brain engineering organization. They embed themselves with the dev team to know product requirements from PM and customer input, understand products and features from conception, are privy to UI design and vocal in its implementation, and part of beta testing. They frontload most of his works when writing articles for new practices, new features by staying engaged all the time.

In future postings, I will expand on how to improve your technical skills and writing processes to improve your agility and ability in supporting software development teams.