What AI Actually Changed About Technical Writing
The prediction was that AI would make technical writers unnecessary. A few years in, that hasn’t happened. What has happened is that the slow parts of the job got considerably faster. Research, note taking, first drafts, restructuring, and reformatting. All of that used to take hours. Now it takes minutes, which is a real change […]
Why Technical Writing Feels Less Draining Than It Used To
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 day, there’s more left in […]
Running BPMN 2.0 Workshops That Actually Produce a Map
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 wall in front of 12 […]
Why UX/UI and Business Analysis Belong in the Same Room
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 requirements were wrong exactly. More […]
How to Get Time Poor SMEs to Give You Information, Then Actually Review the Document
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 the same thing. Your document […]
Why People Skills Matter More Than Technique for a Business Analyst
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 who disagree to tell you […]
Digital Transformation Projects Run on People, Not Plans
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 observation. On a program with […]
Processes in IT digital transformation and why teams need to see how they fit together
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, the gaps between them. Every […]
London 2023… A Reflection on Learning Sales in a Conference You Can’t Replicate Online
Looking back at 2023, one experience still stands out. Attending a live session with Chris Do in London. It was part of a work conference setting, but it felt more focused and practical than most conferences I have attended. Chris Do from The Futur is known for helping creatives and professionals communicate their value and […]