3 Things All Tech Writers Struggle With
Being in the technical documentation business, we naturally maintain close contact with the inner world of technical documentation and the users of our product—the tech writers themselves. In the interest of being able to offer the best product possible, it’s our job to understand the everyday life of tech writers: How they work, what they’re aiming to achieve, as well as what challenges they encounter most.
Over the years we’ve identified 3 things that tech writers commonly struggle with:
-
Getting the information they need from the technical experts
-
Always being the last stop in the pre product release process
-
Obtaining feedback on technical documentation updates
While there is no one universal solution for everything, we’ve seen a lot of tech writers meet these challenges with the help of an organized and systematic documentation system, like our CCMS Skribenta:
-
Several of our customers claim that there will always be last minute changes. The difference with using our CCMS is that they don’t feel stressed about that fact anymore: let them come, I’m ready, everything else is already in place.
-
Last stop in the process? Of course you are. Especially in software development, when the last details are often not finalized until the last hours. Our customers have accepted that fact and simply go with the flow, comforted by the simplicity of adding components and fixing tweaks that Skribenta allows.
-
With an easy review process, people will stop complaining and just do it; especially if they only need to approve the few changes made and not the entire document. Our CCMS streamlines the feedback process, making obtaining feedback a no-problem operation.
HERE’S WHAT ELSE OUR CUSTOMERS ARE SAYING ABOUT SKRIBENTA:
“Before I was wasting time running around hunting for information that did not exist… the last GUI updates or functions hadn’t even been implemented yet. Now I just make sure that everything else is in place and when they come to me with the last minute updates I get them into the documents within a few hours. Happy not to be the one stopping the release, and the person everybody hates, because I wanted something that did not exist” Tech writer at a software company
“We make products based on several subcontractors that we assemble into a turnkey solution for our customers. Until a few years ago, making a new product took a month just for the documentation, and not even accounting for the time it took to document customizations we do every day based on a limited amount of modules. Now, when we have structured everything we’ve realized that there are really very few new things that need updating in our documentation. The last new product took me only 6 minutes to put documentation together for.” Tech writer working with complex turnkey solutions