Agile Best Practices in Technical Documentation
Integrating Agile practices into an information development group requires a shift in thinking about issues such as resource management, task allocation, information quality and completeness, customer focus, and team collaboration. How are companies coping? What benefits are they realizing? What lessons have they learned that can make your transition easier? Join our conversation and learn from industry leaders as they share their real-life experiences and observations on the impact Agile has made in their world.
Meet the Presenters
Dawn Stevens is Vice President of Operations and partner at Comtech Services. With over 25 years of experience, including 15 years at Comtech, Dawn has practical experience in virtually every role within a documentation and training department, including project management, instructional design, writing, editing, and multimedia programming. With both engineering and technical communication degrees, Dawn combines a solid technical foundation with strong writing and design skills to identify and remove the challenges her clients face in producing usable, technical information and training.
Jo-Ann Fogg has over 20 years of experience in authoring technical documentation and in managing technical writing teams for companies such as EMC and VMware. She is currently managing a writing team for the VMware vRealize Suite of Cloud Management products. Jo-Ann’s passion for providing users with the technical content that best meets their needs and for improving documentation practices has led her to her current endeavor of applying Agile principles to the content development process to support shorter feature development and release schedules.
Sharon Figueira has worked in the technical communications field for 18 years, 15 of them as a manager, mostly at the enterprise level. Sharon has been through two major acquisitions, two migrations to DITA/CCMS, and has led teams through offshoring and outsourcing. From 2013 – 2015 she was one of a dozen Ericsson staff participating in a global migration to a DITA/CCMS, taking a leading role on the vendor selection, POC, pilot, and deployment. In 2016, her team was transitioned to HCL, and shortly after that she led the HCL team to win the RFQ to migrate Ericsson legacy content to a DITA/CCMS environment.
Connie Brown is a Tech Content Manager at ARRIS with 5 years’ experience as a manager and 30 years as a writer. Connie currently leads a destributed team of content developers who create content using modern and traditional tools and methods, Agile and otherwise. Connie’s group produces every kind of tech content there is, she thinks. Connie has Bachelor’s degrees in Rhetoric and Math; postgraduate study in Computer Science, Computer Human Interaction, and Usabiliy/Customer Experience; and is a graduate of Half the Sky Leadership Institute.