Technical/Marketing Writing, Team Building, and some other observations

["Paula Puffer" <pcosweb -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

For the person who asked if you feel torn by doing the technical and 
marketing writing. My answer is No.

Currently I have a couple of web projects I am working on outside of my 
software documentation contract. I love my current contract, but I love the 
outlet for creativity that the web projects give me. The biggest of the two 
web projects has given me a great deal of experience of doing Marketing 
Writing. At the start, it was really hard for me to do the marketing 
writing, but it's now getting easier.
A lot of marketing writing involves writing letters of requests to other 
webmasters, and posting announcements to our e-mail lists about the new 
things on the site.

Interestingly enough, the organization that I'm webmaster for has been 
restructuring and merging groups together to try and get rid of duplication 
in staff and projects. We had a lot of duplicate projects between the PR 
committee and the Web Committee. Opening up the lines of communication has 
really helped fostering communication as a whole.

What the Exec. Director did to help foster team work is to make sure that 
each of the various committess had good leadership at its head.
She also took the time to listen to complaints and the frustration, and the 
ideas/solutions we had during this growth period. It's created a great 
atmosphere to be a part of.

(BTW the Exec. Director loves technical writers, there are three of us who 
are involved and we're all applying our skills--Webmaster, grant writing, 
and document processes--to support the group).

As a contrast, the last contract position I had (writing operation manuals) 
was the job from Hades. My boss wouldn't listen to suggestions that would 
have made the process a lot easier. I asked to design a template early on in 
the project, and that was shot down because it would be too time consuming. 
Then when it was discovered that one of the leads had screwed up on page 
size of my book, I ended up implementing the template because it would allow 
me to work faster. They also had a tendency to threaten you with overtime. 
Not to mention the fact that the other documentation did not want to pass 
informaiton that we needed to us. Whew I am glad I am out of there.

The difference between these two is someone communicating with you and 
respecting the skills you have.

Sorry this is kind of jumbled--I need another cup of Java (the liquid kind)

Paula Puffer
webmaestra -at- pcosupport -dot- org
http://www.pcosupport.org




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