Recently, I asked Ron Lichty to review our white paper, Tangible Benefits of Technical Communication Excellence.
If you’re an engineering leader, or aspiring to become one, you should know about Ron. He co-wrote Managing the Unmanageable, which has become the go to handbook for software engineering managers around the world. Full of tips, insights, and checklists, this book may be the most helpful “how to” for leading software development teams ever written. Ron’s book and consulting practice deliver lessons drawn from decades of software engineering experience in companies of all sizes. As Ron puts it, he helps them “make software development reliable and predictable.”
As usually happens when talking with Ron, our follow up conversation generated some key insights.
Our conversation confirmed, yet again, one of Expert Support’s long-held tenets, that some of the most vexing problems for engineers arise from poor technical communication among engineering team members. Whether the communication is between managers and other managers, team leads and contributors, contributors and managers, or technologists and technical sales and marketing teams, there’s no shortage of poor communication throughout our industry.
Thankfully, many of these problems are solved with basic technical communication techniques.
Technical Communication Excellence Leads to Successful Project Execution
Ron offered a couple of examples. For instance, project proposals written by engineers who want to pay down technical debt are often so vague and poorly written that they have no chance of being approved by engineering and product executives. Ron shared the article Building realistic roadmaps for tech debt cleanup, which directly addresses this problem. Here, anticipating the informational needs and interests of your audience is key (namely specific economic benefits and improved efficiencies) and helps such proposals get approved.
Engineers often struggle with technical writing assignments, so we encourage them to get help from the technical writers on their team. The tech writers specialize in documentation, so can help draft or edit internal engineering documents. When a working relationship is established, team communication improves, and the engineering process smooths. Better communication produces better results, including fewer missed requirements, improved initial designs, and ultimately, a significant decrease in the drama and finger pointing that stems from miscommunication.
Is your engineering team at odds with one another? Do you often get blindsided by missed or miscommunicated requirements? Enlist the help of your technical writing team so they can help improve communication across your company. If you’re still struggling to communicate effectively, give us a call. Our customizable Technical Communication Excellence training can put you on the right track.
Optimize Onboarding Through Better Technical Communication
Ron also mentioned the often overlooked high cost of onboarding new engineers. Not only is ramp up time expensive for new engineers, the ramp up investment includes the cost of senior engineers stopping what they’re supposed to be doing to bring new team members up to speed. In fast-moving development shops, established team members are so focused on daily tasks and continual delivery that there’s almost no time to train the engineers who were hired to help.
Onboarding sets the tone for the new hire’s relationship with the team. If it’s confusing and they feel unsupported, new engineers can become frustrated, to the point of leaving the team just as they start to become productive. This loss makes it hard for the team, which then has to restart the hiring and training process. Poor onboarding also damages the reputation of the team, and makes future recruiting efforts even harder if others hear that this group is hard to work for.
In his The Study of Product Team Performance, Ron found that fixing onboarding is possibly the lowest hanging fruit that most organizations have when it comes to process optimization. For more details, read Ron’s post about the critical success factor of onboarding.
When you hear engineers say that it takes forever to become productive in their system, you should immediately recognize that your team is spending too much time ramping up new engineers. Chances are that your engineering teams lack effective documentation required to train new workers. With technical communication and writing help, you can capture this tremendous opportunity to boost engineering efficiencies through better onboarding.
Does your team have a Getting Started document for the software your team is building? If not, you need one. If you don’t know where to start, contact us. Our technical writers can produce it for you.
See our technical writing services or contact us pages to talk about your project needs.