How do you explain a large complex system that is under constant rework to pursue an evolving business reality?

I had the privilege to teach structured writing at the first edition of the Postgraduate Course on Technical Communication at ISCAP (Portugal), sponsored by APCOMTEC, the Portuguese association for technical communication.

The seven students were working professionals looking forward to change or improve their careers. I was surprised when these …

“An image is worth a thousand words. Why can't you draw me that picture? Or create a five-minute video to replace those manuals?”

I have heard similar sentences over the years. Although a good image may make me think of a thousand words, I could never take a thousand words …

The economic crisis in Portugal stimulated the creation of product companies that sell worldwide. Over time, these companies accumulate a capital of knowledge (technical, domain, user) that benefits from governance and engineering by dedicated professionals, traditionally called technical writers.

Technical writers have the ability to learn, organize, and transform knowledge …

Presentations by local technical writers have shown a surprising diversity of writing and content governance scenarios on mature software companies. Mature companies have unique business problems that require unique technical and human solutions.

On Altitude Software, writers struggle to control the complexity created by the organic growth of a mature …

A small software company with a worldwide presence uses one wiki to store or access most company information. Using open source software, the wiki started as a small team tool and then grew to reach technical people. An innovative content strategy proposal later extended the reach of the wiki to …

A small documentation team working on a tight budget can now use the tool ecosystem enabled by the DITA standard to create the sophisticated content that previously required long and expensive projects. The author spent just nine person-weeks over three years to replace a custom XML system with a DITA …

uScrum (uncertainty Scrum) is an agile process developed by a small team at Altitude Software to manage the process of gathering information and writing documentation.

uScrum proposes different practices to estimate tasks, depending on their difficulty as defined by an order of ignorance. Understanding the difficulty of tasks has allowed …

Just-in-time training workshops earned a reputation for the technical writers and disseminated new knowledge throughout the company, effectively training expert employees on new software releases with a series of light sessions.