Most conversations about AI in technical writing focus on speed. How much faster a draft comes out, how many hours a week get saved. That’s measurable, so it gets the attention. The change I notice more is harder to put a number on. By the end of a long documentation
Most improvement projects start in the wrong place. Someone books a workshop, sticks butcher’s paper on the wall, and asks the room to design how things should work. Two hours later there’s a tidy flowchart, a few nodding heads, and a plan that quietly dies within a month. The problem
Process mapping workshops have a reputation for being long, tiring, then producing something nobody uses. Usually that’s not a notation problem. BPMN 2.0 is well designed, widely understood, precise enough for developers while still readable by the business. The problem is what happens in the room. Someone puts a blank
There’s a pattern I’ve seen on more than a few platform rollouts. The business analyst writes the requirements. The designer picks them up afterwards, then makes them look good. Development builds it, testing signs it off, the thing goes live. Six weeks later the support tickets start. Not because the
Every technical writer hits the same wall eventually. The document is 90% done. It just needs 1 subject matter expert to confirm a few details, then sign off. That expert is a senior engineer with 40 meetings a week, a system outage to manage, plus 3 other projects asking for
You can learn the technical side of business analysis in about 6 months. Requirements templates, process notation, user stories, traceability matrices, gap analysis. It’s all learnable, all documented, all fairly consistent from one organisation to the next. What takes years is the other part. Getting a room full of people
I’ve worked on programs with excellent methodology that went badly. I’ve worked on messy ones that landed well. The difference was never the framework. It was who was in the room, how they got on, whether anyone was willing to say the difficult thing out loud. That’s not a soft
Most IT projects don’t stall because of the technology. They stall because nobody agrees on how the work actually gets done. The software gets delivered. The training happens. Then, a few months later, people quietly go back to the old way. Usually it comes down to processes, and more specifically,
Every workplace has that one person who knows how everything actually works. Call her Jane. Jane knows why the invoice template has that weird extra field. She knows which supplier to ring when the usual one goes quiet. She knows the three steps nobody ever wrote down that keep the
