Working with your manager:
How to Establish A Positive Relationship from the Start
- Ask a lot of questions
- Have them define what they value in “good writing”
- Ask someone how they see your role working, including how you will function, who you will talk to, and what you will deliver
- Tread lightly when performing an extensive edit or overhaul right out of the gate
- Establish your own competency and knowledge early on (this can be especially important for female-identifying writers)
- Ask for the information you want and need, instead of being general
- Do your best to identify the correct person to ask a question - be intentional
- Find an ally, even outside of your organizational group
- There’s a need for written materials that’s never going to go away
- Cite studies that prove the value of documentation
- Talk about your own documentation successes, as well as those of others
- Talk to your support or services organization, someone that talks to customers. They should be your ally. Develop this relationship.
- Explain what happens when you don’t have documentation that is that good
- Utilize analytics - wouldn’t you want a website to be good if it has so many views?
- Lone writers can easily bring things to light - they might later think, “how could I have missed this?” (After this happens, reassure them!)
- Remind everyone that you are there to represent the users’ needs.
- ACCEPT CRITICISM
- Do good work in ways that others can see.
- Market yourself as a service within your organization.
- To show the value of your own best practices, tell them that these principles exist, and you’re improving their content. Then they’ll see how the content improved and recognize it.
- Developers will see what you’ve done with their work, and then start to imitate you! They’ll see what it means to apply standards.
- Have genuine enthusiasm for the work of developers, and your own work as well
How to get quality doc reviews from a non-writing-savvy manager:
Frequently, managers who haven’t managed a writer before do not know the type of feedback that we need. For example, a manager might lightly copyedit your work, when what you truly need is a technical review, or their thoughts about a new structure. Here are some suggestions for getting quality docs reviews:
- Create a mini-training on how to review documentation
- Specifically call out the “type” of review that you’re looking for, be it technical, developmental, etc.
- Reinforce good reviewing behaviors
- Create a review checklist of what you’d like them to read for