The company I work with is currently consolidating teams
that work across products, and across the globe. The technical publications
team is one of the first to be truly global.
We now have the task of harmonizing our documents into a common voice and single standard, and plan for placing our data into a content management
system. Although we look forward to this opportunity, we are very aware of the
hugeness of the task.
On top of that, we three leads need to work together as a
team for the first time. In the few joint projects we collaborated on, one of
the leads was the “expert” for the project. In this project, we are all
experts.
We have five different products with that many different
audiences.
Our first document to harmonize is the release notes. Some
of the areas we have noted that need to be decided are: audiences and
deliverables, terminology/definitions, style, section content and headings.
And did I mention that we needed to clean up the
deliverables for migration to the content management system?
Some decisions will be easy to reach (pull out the
installation instructions from the release note), some are not (what do we call
“known issues/defects?”). It will be a struggle to compromise on some points
(metadata!).
But when we have conquered the release notes, we will prove
that it is possible to consolidate teams and provide clean processes and clear
understanding.
