I am a Technical Writing Manager, Principal Technical Writer, Information Architect, and Content Strategist in enterprise software. I have a passion for creating narrative-driven content, and I want to begin sharing the best practices that I have learned throughout my career. I currently lead the content strategy and information architecture for Core Product and AIOps portfolios with over $1.2 billion in annual revenue. I manage 12 Level 3 and 4 Technical Writers in different locations on multiple, complex agile projects. I bring passion and excellent soft skills for mentoring diverse writing teams and establishing best practices in the authoring environment and rich media production. I guess you could say it's all Technical Communication as well.
Now and then I post random musings on my blog at paulwozniczka.com.
I love technical writing because it lets me create content for different purposes and a diverse range of products. I enjoy thinking about different approaches to presenting content and also helping users solve their problems. This content includes text, diagrams, audio, or video; whatever it takes! I absolutely love having creative freedom in crafting the perfect content. My teams trust me to provide the best content.
I do not know exactly why I became a technical writer and then a manager, but perhaps I just enjoy telling people what to do? I always enjoyed writing, and technical writing lets me approach problems from a high-level view and then begin to immediately break down all the steps. Have you ever been frustrated by reading lots of content but you never solved your problem? This style of writing provides a very "A to Z" presentation to solve your problem!
I love to provide narrative-driven content because I love to tell the user a story. I also focus on the why instead of just the how and what. I also try to leave no stone unturned. I want to provide a complete end-to-end view, so I avoid too many assumptions about my user. Do NOT always assume that users meet or understand your 500 prerequisites!
Technical writers have a broad range of skills that go beyond writing procedures and overview information. I often wear many hats, and I enjoy it! I thrive in this kind of environment!
These broad range of technical writing skills include:
- Structured Authoring
- Providing an Information Architecture to structure large volumes of information
- Organizing content into specific types, such as concepts, processes, and tasks (DITA)
- Content Strategy
- Involving the planning, designing, authoring, and innovating of technical content
- Determining the appropriate content type for your audience, including API references, SDK documentation, technical specifications, visual overviews, procedures, and rich media
- Audience Analysis
- Understanding the intended users of the content and helping them solve their problems
- Knowing who will consume your content and ensure that it meets their needs
- Professional Writing
- Modifying the format and tone based on the purposes
- Writing for customer decision makers, legal, product marketing, and other corporate roles
- Rich Media Production
- Recording, editing, and producing dynamic content for YouTube
- Developing interactive content including instructional videos and tutorials
- Project Management
- Managing content throughout the product development lifecycle
- Navigating through different levels of an organization
- Functionality Verification
- Testing the user interface as a customer advocate
- Providing feedback to help improve the User Experience
This list of skills only scratches the surface. We do A LOT.
I have worked on many enterprise products in both mainframe and distributed where I specialized in planning, writing, restructuring, and editing technical documentation.
In the examples that follow, I wrote a majority of the product documentation. The most notable areas are Release Notes, Getting Started, Installing, Administering, Implementing, Using, and Reference. These particular sections get the most traffic in most product documentation spaces. These projects operate in a global, Agile environment with large development teams. The customers that use these products include various government agencies, almost every major financial and banking organization, large retailers, and so on.
I have lead the technical writing efforts and teams for the following projects (remember to Ctrl+Click to open the link in a new tab!):
- The Getting Started, Preparing for Installation, Installing, and Integrating sections received an STC Award of Excellence!
- The thorough prerequisite and installation information was vetted by customers to ensure a smooth installation of a complex, multi-product solution.
- Whenever possible, I add architectural diagrams to help customesr with implementing a solution.
- The Installation Checklist was a big hit with our customers!
- The Troubleshooting section helps customers resolve their common issues, so that they do not have to contact support.
- I documented many specific parameter and coding examples to improve the reference information.
- The primary audience of many parts of this documentation are developers who need specific coding examples to help set up and maintain event automation in their environments.
- The Best Practices section contains content that our customers wanted featured more prominently.
- The API Reference uses Swagger and OpenAPI and this content also won an STC Award!
- API Developers have provided excellent feedback about this content. In addition to Swagger, I used a reference style that I helped standardize at my company because it helped with the PDF output (Swagger does not export to PDF in Confluence).
- I created the entire documentation set from scratch because it was a brand new product.
- I want to highlight the Installing section which covers the various deployment scenarios. Our customers have different environments, so I captured every possible combination.
- I also provided diagrams to help them plan their deployments and get up and running.
- The Overview content covers several remote systems, including OpenVMS, UNIX, Linux, Windows, z/OS, and z/VM.
- The Installing and Upgrading section follows a standard that helped create for the organization.
- I created several YouTube videos about the functionality of this web component to CA NetMaster
- I ensured that the Utilities section contained many examples of sample output.
- This product has several related documentation sets, many of which are Reference content.
- The Administering section provides examples of my style when writing task-based documentation that is also easily searchable.
- This example shows the various audiences that I craft my content.
- The Installing and Configuration content ensures that customers can get up and running with a powerful product.
- The Administering content shows more example of my task-based writing, such as setting up multi-tenancy.
- The Integrating content has some of the largest views because many customers utilize these powerful integrations.
- The Planning section helps you prepare for this complex solution.
- The Installation section provides prerequisite and preparation content such as checklists.
These products involved many areas of an enterprise for all types of customers:
- Machine Learning, Visual Analytics, and Anomaly Detection
- Application and Performance Management
- Database Management
- Event Management and Automation
- API Development and SDK Documentation
- Network and System Administration
- Virtualization in Windows, Linux, and System z
- Help Desk Management
- ITIL (Service Management, CMDB, Configuration Items, Asset Management)
- Project and Portfolio Management