Day in the Life of a Tech Pubs Manager

As a guest blogger for Anne Gentle, I was asked to describe a day in the life of a Tech Pubs manager, so here it goes.

I had a difficult time trying to describe a single day because every day is so different. A lot of the audience of this blog includes the technical writing community, so I thought I would start by saying what’s different about managing a team of technical writers versus being a technical writer.

The first thing that comes to mind is meetings, meetings, and more meetings. Because I am responsible for delivering documentation for 6 major product solutions comprising over 30 individual products, there is a lot I need to keep up with! So, on a daily basis, I need to attend engineering management meetings to keep in touch with plans, strategies, statuses, issues, and delivery dates. On any given day, I normally need to review and approve some sort of project document for any given products, whether a project plan or a requirements specification.

I also make a point to build strong relationships with my engineering manager counter parts to ensure the documentation team is considered a critical part of the overall product delivery. I spend a lot of time advocating, evangelizing, and touting information development and its importance to our customers and making sure that we have the information that we need to be successful in planning and delivering product documentation.

I also need to keep up with the information development department, so I attend regular staff meetings with pubs management and single subject meetings related to a number of tech pubs projects.

I have 13 people on my team that I meet regularly with, so a typical day would include one or more regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings to discuss projects, issues, objectives, assignments, personal situations, and general catching up. It is important to me to not only focus on work but also to focus on people. After all, we spend a heck of a lot of time together.

A typical day also includes several “drop in” phone calls or meetings. Let’s face it, things come up. I get lots of “do you have a minute,” which usually means more than a minute. I willingly have an “open door” policy, so I try to accommodate ad hoc discussions. It does, however, often change what I thought I was going to get done on a given day versus what I actually get done.

One key difference between being a technical writer and being a manager is that my tool set has changed dramatically. I used to need a developer-level machine so I could run FrameMaker, DreamWeaver, Acrobat, and enterprise-level software that was in a, well, let’s say, less than stable state. I needed the most current JRE, a web server, and possibly a database so that I could run the alpha or beta application that I was documenting.

As a manager, I spend nearly all day in Outlook, Word, Internet Explorer, Excel, and PowerPoint. I spend a lot of time developing reports and presentations so that I can present to engineering management, my management, and to the technical writing community. Due to the heavy meeting schedule, it’s difficult on any given day to carve out time to develop my deliverables, so I often do this work in the early morning or the late afternoon during non-peak meeting times.

I have to make a special note about Outlook, although it is not unique to being a manager, I think it may be especially challenging for a manager. On a typical day, I receive between 100 and 150 emails. Some are FYI, some are spam, some require my review and response, and some require action on my part. If I get behind, which I usually am, my inbox can easily creep up to over 1000 items. This alone can be quite overwhelming. I deal with it using Outlook rules and Outlook flags. I created a personal system for managing the huge volume of email, but my team will probably tell you that my personal system needs some improvement because I frequently get behind. I have a similar challenge managing the Outlook calendar and probably spend no less than 30 minutes a day scheduling and rescheduling meetings, setting up web sessions, and finding conference rooms. Sometimes, scheduling one single meeting with conference rooms in multiple geographic locations can take as much as an hour!

Finally, a typical day for me lately includes working on our project to implement structured authoring using DITA at BMC. On a given day, I need to “study” the current technology, develop a presentation, attend a project meeting, or update project documents. I am still a technologist at heart, and my boss might say I’m getting too much in the details, but I am willing to spend the extra time it takes to keep up with technology and technical writing trends because I really do enjoy it.

At least one day a week, I try to hook up with old friends and new peers in the technical writing industry, usually for lunch. I think it’s important to keep up with other people in the software industry who are doing similar work so we can share information, challenges, and successes.

Let’s see, those are the highlights of a typical day. In fact, as I write this blog entry for Anne (which is late already!), I am sitting in Sunnyvale, California where we held a major project meeting today to continue our DITA project work. And, as you may have guessed, I need to get to another meeting!