Tête-à-Tête with Neelam

By Asha B A

“Blending technology with language” is what has brought Neelam Singh close to technical communication. A seasoned, seven-year young in the IT industry, Neelam is currently with Oracle India Pvt. Ltd, Bangalore. She is an engineering graduate in Electrical and Electronics from the National Institute of Engineering, Mysore. She has worked with companies such as Exeter Systems (now SCT) and Kirloskar Multimedia.

The Indus team chose to bring Neelam’s views, opinions, experiences, and concerns on technical writing in this issue. With a strong technical background and a flair for communication, Neelam decided to venture into the field of Technical Writing. She has actively played the roles of a content developer, an instructional designer, and a technical writer. On the job, she wears the hats of an interviewer, a QA member, an SME, and a negotiator. Currently, at Oracle India, she is responsible for developing courseware and guides for a few modules in the Oracle E-business Suite of CRM products.

The “Doc-can-wait” attitude of product managers and developers irks Neelam. She says, “Not involving writers in the beginning of the product life cycle leads to lack of accurate or complete information in the resultant documentation. Not receiving technical review feedback on time delays deliverables.”

How does she approach these challenges at the job?

• “First, documentation plans should be plugged into product development plans. If development schedules are mapped to documentation schedules, modifications to schedules can easily be tracked. Also, this integration helps provide visibility to documents that are developed,” she confirms.
• “Second, regular meetings should be conducted with product managers, developers, and other support teams. Updates to the product can be collected, and its impact on documentation can be shared with these teams. This process needs to be formalized,” Neelam adds.

Neelam feels that it is important that after the document is frozen, no more modifications should be accepted. To enable this, she recommends that a formal “documentation sign-off” meeting or a process should be developed. Implementing such processes will ease the work of a technical writer and quality deliverables can be delivered on time.

We asked her “Do you like mentoring junior writers? What do you think is the secret of effective mentoring that can produce fast results?”
Her answer is interesting. “I like mentoring not only junior writers, but anyone who wants to be mentored. Anybody who is experienced, knowledgeable, and willing to share information, irrespective of designations, can be a mentor. Yes, I do like mentoring, and I also get chances to mentor at Oracle.”

Neelam feels, “To get fast results, a mentor must be genuinely interested in mentoring, and a mentor must be willing to share trade secrets to avoid reinventing the wheel. The mentor should be able to withhold the interest of the mentee, help the mentee set realistic goals, and encourage the mentee to explore and take on new challenges. Bottom line — mentoring is a two-way learning process.”

What is important for an upcoming writer? Should one focus more on building language skills or content development skills? Neelam says, “Today, it is easier to find people with a technical edge than someone who has a strong command over language. It is important to sharpen our language skills.”

How does she like being an STC member? How has it helped her? “Exposure is a definite bonus with an STC membership. You get to know more about the profession and also about the research in various aspects of technical writing.” Her paper on ”Maintaining Quality Control in Documentation” has been published in the proceedings of the 49th STC Annual Conference, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. In this paper, she presents an overview of how to maintain quality control in documentation and introduces the concept of testing in the mainstream documentation cycle. She probes the need to go beyond checklists before shipping a document. Her paper describes how various QA techniques can be applied to documentation and also gives an insight to improve the quality of documentation.

She has conducted a learning session on Documentation Test Plans (DTP), in which she emphasized the importance of quality in technical writing and the role of a technical writer in the documentation quality life cycle. Her stimulating talk caused discussions around questions such as: What could be defined as quality goals? Does quality mean just delivering a document or delivering a quality document? How does one create zero defect documents?

Though Neelam is a native of Mumbai, she chose Bangalore to be able to strike a balance between work and play. She is the youngest of four daughters and her family is settled in Mumbai. Not only does she enjoy playing with words and technology, but she also likes to question and ponder over the essence of her existence.

These words summarize her thought process: “If all of us were more focused towards quality in our lives, we would have it in abundance. We would have higher satisfaction levels and therefore, have lesser complaints.”

She enjoys reading, healing, meditating, and listening to music.

Asha BA is an IP Developer with Lucent Technologies.