Featured TC: Jody Winter
Jody Winter completed the Technical Communicator Showcase survey last year, and was the winner of the lucky draw (chocolates and a TechCommNZ coffee cup were duly despatched to her home in Auckland). Rhiannon Davies caught up with her by Skype last week.
In 2009 Jody was brought in to document their large, feature-rich point-of-sale system – at the time documented in gargantuan, out of date files of individual Word documents. The information had to be consolidated into one easily-maintained, accessible system.
Jody’s weapon of choice was Author-it. Up until then, she’d been self-employed, working on disaster recovery, and she had never required anything more comprehensive than MS Word. For something as complex as a systematic user assistance project to be delivered en masse across the country, Jody needed something stronger. The enormous, holistic POS system has cloud versions, and a raft of add-ons, so the tools had to be able to cope with the demand. Author-it was a steep learning curve for Jody, but she tackled it with aplomb.
Infinity’s POS system had three levels – a head office mode for multi-store chains, a back office mode, and a point of sale. All of these have an apparel mode and a non-apparel mode – six lots of similar content with slight tweaks to differentiate. Jody needed to publish a version for combinations of all six, and release web help for all modes across the board, both internally and externally. After releasing the web help, Jody documented the side-products: loyalty programmes, card programmes, international currency sites - these all needed documentation for both apparel and non-apparel modes. Author-it was perfect for this task because creating different variations is remarkably easy.
The real fun began with the invention of Jody’s fake retail business so she could approach the functionality as a customer would – a health store was born, and to deal with the apparel mode, she invented funky merino undies. Fake suppliers and document pages were made to create supply chains so Jody could use the site as a retailer would. Developing the documents was a standard procedure – Jody interviewed subject matter experts, or documented the process as she worked things out for herself when the SMEs were unavailable. She created first and second drafts for review and finally testing.
The first release was to Jody’s colleagues as web-help and was a resounding success. All of the old documentation was retired at once in a smooth digital coup d'état. Triquestra kept the web help internally for about a year, and when the content was about 70-75% documented for functionality it was embedded with the product and released to the customer base. The process from start to first external release took 18 months, and a further 6 months before feedback started to filter back from the clients. The web help and its associated eLearning videos were such a success that Triquestra showed their appreciation for Jody by throwing her a pirate-themed morning tea.
After her triumph at Triquestra, Jody moved on to Affinity Employer Services. About her new project, Jody says “I’ve only been there 6 months but I’ve already documented 60% of the product, and we’re hoping to release the first cut of the help before Christmas. The beauty of it is that in the future it’ll be ready to hand over to someone else. It’s something that I can get to a point and pass on to someone else like I have with Triquestra. It’s built, it just needs to be maintained.”
Would you like to be interviewed about your work, or nominate a colleague? Contact the Communications Coordinator today.