One of the perennial questions that development teams face is the struggle to staff a full time technical writer. Of course, I have an opinion on this…but I was quite stricken by Kenneth S. Rubin’s analysis of this very question in his book, Essential Scrum. He frames the discussion in the context of cost-of-delay calculations, and the difference between idle work and idle workers. Consider:
(more…)
Scrum, Idle Work, and Idle Workers
From Essential Scrum by Kenneth S. Rubin:
Idle work is work that we want to do (such as building or testing something) but can’t do because something is preventing us. […] Many product development organizations focus more on eliminating the waste of idle workers than on the waste of idle work. […] In Scrum, we are acutely aware that finding the bottlenecks in the flow of work and focusing our efforts on eliminating them is a far more economically sensible activity than trying to keep everyone 100% busy.
Scrum Makes Problems Visible
Lots of organizations think “Scrum fixes problems,” and are then surprised that when they try to implement Scrum, all they see are all sorts of problems. Frequently this is used as justification for giving up, or claiming, “It doesn’t work!”
Scrum doesn’t fix problems. Teams do. Scrum makes problems visible so that teams can fix them.
Technical Writing: The Three Things I Wish I Was Told When I Started
Slide deck from a presentation for aspiring technical writers given at Mt. Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, IA on October 9, 2013.
Search Traffic & Content Investments
Search traffic is the compounded interest on your content investments. If you’re not getting a return, look at your investments…
Thoughts on “Quality Content”
I measure content quality by performance metrics over opinion metrics:
- Are people reading it?
- Is it there for them when they need it?
- Are they sharing it?
- Do they tell you they’ve fallen in love with it?
- Do readers spend time reading it?
- Are they clicking on the calls to action?
- Are they subscribing to the RSS feed?
- Are they commenting on it?
- Are they coming back to read more?
Notice that one thing I don’t use to measure quality content is weather or not you like it.
There’s a reason for that.
SEO Is Not Magic
I’ve seen mediocre content underperform because of poor SEO. I’ve even seen poor content peform middling-well because of proper SEO. But one thing I’ve never seen is truly great content fail to perfrom because of inattention to SEO.
SEO is not magic. It’s just one set of many content quality signals search engines consider. If you’re not investing in quality content, it makes little sense to invest in SEO to try to compensate for that.
On brevity…
Never sacrifice Useful upon the altar of Brevity.
The Trouble With Being On Two Teams
The trouble with being on two teams is that you wind up being on none.
Screw Sexy, Be Useful
From Amahl Majack’s, 5 Ways to Liven Up Your Boring Business Blog
Screw Sexy, Be Useful
Not all web content needs to be sexy. The key to making boring industry content interesting is education. Creating helpful and useful content to serve the people who are actively looking for answers is often more important than trying to go “viral.” As business bloggers, our role is to be industry educators and to help solve problems.
