In order to truly become trusted advisors, we at Intraway have strived to become coherent with our product offering. After all, it is hard to be taken seriously if your own ecosystem of products and operations is not consistent. We endeavor to be steadfast and dependable in all our ventures and we are making great progress in these areas. We have a wide offer of features and functionalities, and a wide array of products for the provisioning and management of services and customers.
We are making great efforts to make Intraway products work cooperatively to improve client and customer experience. So, what’s the role of the Documentation team in all of this? The telecommunications industry is a very dynamic environment: it sets an urgent pace to meet customers’ needs and requirements on time and due form. This pace makes it easy for all teams within a company to develop tunnel vision and focus exclusively on their own goals and objectives. Team members focus on their –very demanding– issues and challenges and can lose the ability to see the big picture.
As a technical writer, I feel we are in an outstanding position to bring our expertise to bear. As part of our job, we need to gather all information regarding a product or feature, and that allows us to have a great view of the entire development cycle of products, from the designing stage to the implementation or deployment stages. So I’d say we are in a significant position to create and foster company-wide standards and protocols to take full advantage of the different skills of our coworkers in different teams.
Technical writing is a highly collaborative work. We have to interact daily with people with a whole variety set of skills and backgrounds different from our own. We try to be open, flexible and attentive to their needs. We try to give unambiguous answers and honest replies. We try to be approachable and to help people do the best job with the tools we have. We have always tried to understand the business side of the industry and the technological aspects of the job to be able to plan accordingly.
First, we worked hard to make the documentation process as streamlined as it can be. As I said before, it is a matter of trial and error until it works for everyone and our participation in the development process feels organic and helps other teams to achieve their goals satisfactorily. We are working on this by attending several team meetings and reaching out to advance on team managers and product leaders for their input. We are not trying to be unobtrusive; we are working to actively lend a hand and carry the burden of assisting the flow of information within the organization.
We are constantly trying to gauge the rhythm of the company by writing several documents simultaneously. The idea is to ease off the pressure on a development team that’s hustling to meet a deadline and to move onto another team that’s working at a more comfortable pace. It pays to help balance the load of different teams so your co-workers feel they can rely on you to approach them when they actually have time to meet your demands. We value teamwork and care about our workmates, so we try to be aligned with their goals and objectives. We fully embrace new practices and are not afraid of change.
We see ourselves as one of the repositories of knowledge and information within the company. We try to give support to all the areas that interact with Intraway customers. We work hard to make complex concepts understandable, and user guides easy to read. We do tons of research regarding the products Intraway offers to its customers so our documentation is always updated and our documents follow the latest trends.
We need to work collaboratively with other areas of the company to achieve our goals. Nevertheless, we always try to be prepared and abreast of the latest developments so we make the best use of our and others time. We are constantly making decisions that have an impact on our output and the way we do things. We take pride in the work we do, but we are not afraid to challenge assumptions along the way. We are always trying to find a better way to do things, either in interactions between teams or the development of products and services. We give our feedback whenever we find superfluous elements or components, and we highlight what we consider essential for customer satisfaction. This general improvement trickles down to the final product documentation: it is always easier to describe and explain things that make sense to you and your colleagues.
I think we did a good job at discovering our core values: we are, as a company, already on the right track to becoming the embodiment of those values, among which are building the best team and becoming trusted advisors. It has been a fun ride and I found out that in order to successfully become trusted advisors globally, as a company, each and every one of us has to become a trusted advisor to our colleagues and coworkers.
