Manual writer

My wife says I'm an introverted extrovert. She also says that I'm fine talking with people as long as they can't interrupt me. So, that makes me a good performer.
Normally, I just go along with these notions of hers but today I'm having to really think about it.
Yesterday, I had an opportunity to reach out to some folks who could really contribute some great stuff to my job. I had stage fright. I could barely speak and my voice came out trembling and weak. I repeated my inane three sentences over and over. I just about fainted.
And they just sat there staring at me.
Here I was asking them to help me do my job and they were already feeling that the company hung them out over a croc pit. I should have used that, I should have told them that cooperation between them and us could make a better world. Suddenly, I have the sound of children's voices trilling out the tune "It's a Small World" and I can hear the hysterical laughter starting in the back of my head.
Hopefully, the people who train our users will feel that their feedback to the team that writes the manuals will be worth their time and effort.

Like a number of technical writing teams we have users and we have customers. They are not the same people, they don't have the same goals, and they don't have the same level of access.
Our customers are the project teams. The managers responsible for getting the product out the door. They have customers and users, and again they aren't the same people. Ultimately, our customers, the people who pay for our services and place the value on our services are the shareholders. They don't come down to the cubicle I sit in and tell me that I can or cannot do something, they have a much more effective tool set.
The shareholders tell the executives that they want to make more money. The executives figure out whether they can do that by producing more market share, reducing development costs, or by firing a bucketload of employees (and dumping their workload on the remaining employees). It seems to come down to a mix of options. Get more product releases out, sell more of them, and reduce the cost of producing them.
Lovely. Well, all things considered, producing content that accurately reflects the product and provides meaningful assistance to the folks who end up using the products is a snakey line dance. With more product releases we have to march through our process more often, making small and large changes, and regurgitating content on an assembly line model. Can do. Wait, though, our users are different (not really within a single product line but across product lines) and we want to increase sharing so that we can pick up the pace on production.
We have been tracking down the people who meet users, for real, and asking them what the users need. The results are diametrically opposed to the trend to reduce content and promote reuse. Dang.

I'm trying to get permission to write more freely about our DITA activities. It's very different in a corporation.
For most of my career, I've worked in relatively small shops where there is a reliance on outside sources for experience and information on technologies and techniques. I was always encouraged to absorb and share information and experience. In a corporation, they just hire you; if you need new input, they hire that. But, what you develop out of that combination of experience and instruction becomes both confidential and a competitive advantage. Or so I'm told. I'm curious, how can I know that my processes are a competitive advantage without knowing what my competitors' processes are?
I may never know the answer to that question.
But, I am learning how to operate within a corporation. I've started thinking of it as a fictional environment. A place where the suspension of disbelief is integral to success. To fully experience the fantasy, you must be able to leave reality at the door.
I have learnt some excellent lessons so far:

1. When in doubt, defer the problem up the chain to the person responsible for you.


2. Learn how to ask, appropriately. Form your arguments ahead of time, put them in writing, and be skillful in your distribution. Do not antagonize those you need on your side by leap-frogging them in the process. Give them a chance to say nothing, or no.


3. Get down with numbers. Even if the person you're reporting to is not a numbers freak, the hands on the reins are.


4. Regardless of the product, the ultimate customer is the shareholder/owner.


5. This is your job, not your life.

Some of that may seem cynical to you. I don't think it is. I come home after a hard day of slogging and I sit down to write. I read about writing. I love writing. But, in the amusement park of employment, there are restrictions and fictions that I need to respect if I'm going to succeed in my personal goals. I want to be happy. Trying to change how a corporation operates, from a cubicle in nowhere, isn't going to make me happy. Now, if I could write like some of my favourite authors, I could enjoy a bit of poking fun at corporations and the mad, mad world that they give rise to.
I am grateful that I'm working in a corporation and have learned to walk the walk well enough to be a kept woman. I get to play with stuff that fascinates me and I get to work with some incredible people. It's almost like being in love.
When the network gets wonky, when the engagement surveys come out, when I sit through hours of drivel from the talking heads, and when the path to my objective is strewn with cultural icons and practices that seem almost normal but leave me feeling disorientated and alienated, well, I look at the whole picture. These are the folks that have the money to pay for me to play in my sandbox. I'm not ten people. When I was younger, and had more energy, being ten people in a small company was a blast. Now I'm like the cartoon wolf clocking in and clocking out.