We’d love your input in developing the course outline for our new workshop for documentation managers and leaders of documentation projects who want to do more than just provide a traditional user manual/Help file.
We’ve developed a course outline, but we’d like to know your opinion regarding what topics you think a workshop like this should cover. Your feedback will help us assess whether we’ve got the course topics right or not.
Audience: People in companies setting the strategy and planning how to assist their users via Help and user documentation. As well as public seminars, these would also be on site courses, comprising Documentation team and perhaps some people from UI, Support and Training.
Purpose: To Help them identify what’s needed, understand the different approaches available, identify the best approach to them, and to start planning how to develop the solution.
Duration: 1/2 day or 1 day
Here are a few thoughts for a syllabus (btw, it would be nice to have the syllabus available so we know what you’ve already got covered):
1) Social media, both as a means for delivering information and as a means for learning about customer needs wrt your product/service.
2) Agile methodologies.
3) Remote development teams, both directly managing remote writers and interacting with remote SMEs. A sub-case of this is dealing with teams that have been off-shored to save costs.
4) Trends in technology, including wikis, XML, and topic-oriented methodologies.
Probably nothing here that you haven’t considered already, but just in case…