Re: growing a department (was: doing a good job...)

[Nancy Hickman <nhickman -at- GVI -dot- NET>]

Yes, the number one reason for increasing a staff is a higher workload.
But it's not the only reason. My point is that meeting deadlines and
producing adequate work is not the only aim of a tech doc department. It
is producing work that is the best in the industry.

If you find yourself in a position of wanting to create a better product
or even add information products, yet you don't have the time or the
training, it's time to grow, even though your work has been deemed "good
enough" in the past.

And recruiting people that have talents that the group doesn't have or
doesn't have in large supply is a good idea. A person with years of
experience in something like art is usually much better than someone
that has completed a two-day training course. It's much too prideful to
say that the whole team can't recruit someone of high talent, and the
whole team and the product experiencing the benefit of that person. You
may be holding the team back by only recruiting entry level people or
only generalists. Why not put out the best work possible?

I think that tech doc groups should look at how other groups recruit.
When a management position comes open in application development, don't
they want to get the best and the brightest? If they view the position
in high esteem and respect, they will. When an application group is
hiring, don't they look for talent that they don't have?

Yes, training is a part of the picture, and I've been on this list
arguing for training. Training is an ongoing effort, and you should be
actively grooming talent within a group. In fact, I'd argue that if you
have someone really good at something, that they should be able to
concentrate on that talent. But what I'm referring to is a larger vision
of the roles and responsibilities in a department.

Tech doc groups ought to have a vision for themselves and allow a
greater variety of positions. People ought to have more levels of
promotability in an organization, and leaders ought to be actively
arguing and creating this for them. The leaders in the groups ought to
step up to bat for the group when headcount increase time comes around.

Today's vision of the workload of a tech doc group may not be enough
when you expect to get into new medias next year or raise the bar of the
output that you are producing. In other groups, "good enough" to higher
management may be a loser attitude. In tech doc groups, communicating to
upper management that you don't have a vision for improving your product
beyond how you meet deadlines just tells them not to take your product
very seriously. You ought to have a new features list for the upcoming
release, just as the application product (or the engineering product)
has. You ought to have a career ladder for people in your group as well.

If you are in a group that needs a vision of the future, develop a one,
two, or three year plan on how you will raise the bar. How will
promotability levels change? How will training budgets be increased? How
will compensation levels change? What areas of work or specialization
can be developed to a higher level? What would that mean? Taking care of
these issues is a part of taking leadership of a group and taking care
of the members of the group and creating a fun, exciting, and rewarding
place to work.

Having a defeatist attitude that "things have always been this way" and
"they'll never go for it" is being like Igor in the Winnie the Pooh
comics. It's funny in its way, but you can't help thinking that Igor
doesn't enjoy life very much.

-- Nancy Hickman