{"id":5055,"date":"2016-06-16T15:35:38","date_gmt":"2016-06-16T20:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.encoretechresources.com\/insights\/?p=5055"},"modified":"2016-06-17T22:54:38","modified_gmt":"2016-06-18T03:54:38","slug":"putting-it-all-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.encoretechresources.com\/insights\/2016\/06\/16\/putting-it-all-together\/","title":{"rendered":"Putting It All Together"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.encoretechresources.com\/insights\/wp-content\/uploads\/imgres-6.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.encoretechresources.com\/insights\/wp-content\/uploads\/imgres-6.jpg\" alt=\"imgres\" width=\"208\" height=\"243\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-5062\" \/><\/a>Interana Inc. is a behavior analytics company in Redwood  City, CA., an organization in which Neal Kaplan is the Senior User Assistance Manager. Kaplan has 20+ years experience as a technical writer and distilled his experience into a presentation at the recent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.writethedocs.org\/conf\/na\/2016\/\">Write the Docs conference<\/a> in Portland, Oregon. <\/p>\n<p>Kaplan was concerned with relationships between the documentation and customer support units of organizations, &#8220;Two Great Teams that Work Great Together,&#8221; or need to, to be sure. He&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/customersandcontent.com\/2016\/06\/08\/my-presentation-from-wtd-2016\/#more-279\">posted his slides<\/a> on the Web and they&#8217;re well worth experiencing, as though you were at the meeting. <\/p>\n<p>The people who write manuals and other support materials have to be working in concert with their colleagues who provide direct support to an organization&#8217;s customers. That&#8217;s a truism that needs to be achieved in daily practice. &#8220;We don&#8217;t want customers to shut up and go away,&#8221; one of Kaplan&#8217;s slides reads. &#8220;Happy customers = more dollars&#8221; the next one notes.<\/p>\n<p>What occurs when the two presumably collegial units aren&#8217;t in synch? &#8220;Frustration&#8221; proclaims Slide No. 31. There follow a number of steps Kaplan recommends to insure that the two groups are indeed working together toward a common aim.    <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Knock down silos&#8221; is prime among them. Insure that the document writers and the document interpreters are working together for clarity and mutual understanding, relationships that can then be shared with customers, to everyone&#8217;s gain.<\/p>\n<p>Kaplan delivered his message to 400 attendees at the Portland conference and is now sharing it with many thousands more on the Web. It&#8217;s a message that never wears thin: Technical writers have had to accomplish much in terms of training and experience to get where they are. But all that effort is of little use to anyone if it&#8217;s not shared with empathy and clarity with colleagues in other departments and their hoped-for customers in the wider world.<\/p>\n<p>Super-evident? Probably. Readily practiced? Not always. Absorb Neal Kaplan&#8217;s slides. \u2013 <em>Doug Bedell<\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Interana Inc. is a behavior analytics company in Redwood City, CA., an organization in which Neal Kaplan is the Senior User Assistance Manager. Kaplan has 20+ years experience as a technical writer and distilled his experience into a presentation at the recent Write the Docs conference in Portland, Oregon. Kaplan was concerned with relationships between [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.encoretechresources.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5055"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.encoretechresources.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.encoretechresources.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.encoretechresources.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.encoretechresources.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5055"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/www.encoretechresources.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5070,"href":"http:\/\/www.encoretechresources.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5055\/revisions\/5070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.encoretechresources.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.encoretechresources.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.encoretechresources.com\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}