This document discusses breaking down silos between teams to improve collaboration. It recommends identifying allies across departments, setting up regular communication through meetings and messaging, and listening to other teams to understand their needs. The goal is for teams to work together to solve problems and feel ownership over solutions. Communication is emphasized as key to breaking down silos and enabling teams to help each other get out of boxes to improve the overall experience for customers.
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A few hats I wear…
• Technical writer
• Information architect
• Information designer
• Consultant
• Employee
• Trainer
• College professor
• Mentor
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Team
• A group of people who compete in a sport, game, etc., against another group
• A group of people who work together
- Merriam Webster Dictionary
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“John and Paul were so obviously more creative as a pair than as individuals,
even if at times they appeared to work in opposition to each other.”
Joshua Wolf Shenk
“The Power of Two”
The Atlantic
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• Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
• William and Dorothy Wordsworth
• Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy
The essence of their achievements, it turns out, was
relational.
Joshua Wolf Shenk
“The Power of Two”
The Atlantic
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Figure out who needs to be on the team
• Product documentation
• Customer Care
• Marketing
• Brand
• Sales
• Web
• UI Designers
• Developers
• Across departments
• Across Regions
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Identify your allies
• Who works on content similar to yours?
• What are their needs?
• Is there anything that you can help them with?
• Build relationships!
• Communicate!
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Be a new best friend…
• Insert yourself
• Set up a monthly meeting, even if it’s just a check in…what are you
guys working on?
• Does your company use Skype or Slack? Message them once in a
while…keep them updated on what’s in a release…hey, did you
know…maybe they already heard, but maybe not!
• Sit with them at lunch
• Listen in on the Customer Care phone calls
• Ask what’s new in their world
Not just out of the box thinking…out of the box behavior
sharepointmaven.com
It’s not about my toys versus your toys.
It’s about doing what is best for the customer
Which is ultimately what is best for us…more sales…more money
We all bring something to the table
If others in your organization are creating content, there is likely an overlap in needs. Can you help them by providing images? Source content? Ask them to do peer editing?
Offer to help developers write text for wizards, error messages.
Informal at first
But then they become your best advocate
Irony…technical communicators can be the least likely to communicate with others within the org…we’re all guilty
Find a place where you can offer help.
I started with wireframes, basically the UI spec for a release.
I reviewed them as part of writing the documentation.
But I noticed that the text could use improvements.
So, I went to the UI designer and offered to polish the text on the screens.
She was delighted!
And when a software engineer asked her to create a screen for an error message, she did the images for it and told him to ask me to write the text.
Now engineers are coming to me for help with error message text…
Customer Care asked us to review communications to our customers such as surveys and emails.
Marketing asked us to partner with them to write the release notes.
So, now we’re becoming the funnel through which content from a lot of areas is passing
Digitalbloggers.com
It’s all good as long as you keep this in mind
Now that you’ve got all these groups coming to you for help, it’s a little like this…
Just kidding
A lot of people across organizations are advocating for us to review their content.
We’re gaining traction, momentum, critical mass!
Amazon.com
We reached out to the Brand organization
They get to use all those pretty words so we asked them to work with us on a guide
Show booklets
We reviewed the Brand materials on voice and applied them to the content that we review
We sent sample re-writes to Brand to make sure we are applying the principles correctly.
We carved out a small, doable chunk of work that we could apply to tone of voice principles to and show as a success story. Proof of concept.
The people we connected with in the first work we did were our biggest advocates
We’re working on the project
In the meantime, we are getting requests across the company to review content for voice
We are coming closer to presenting a unified voice to the customer
