Quality management

What a great turnout we had on Tuesday for the Quality Management event in Aarhus, and thank you so much to Professor Jan Engberg for kindly hosting us at the university! Around 60 technical communicators attended, including several students from Jan’s faculty.

We covered a range of topics within quality management, including effective User Assistance techniques, managing your terminology, understanding the impact of the media you use when presenting content, and how your passion for communication makes you valuable and can make your job very rewarding.

New tekom Danmark team

Holger Thater opened the event and introduced the new five-strong tekom Danmark committee (Holger Thater, Per Harbo Sørensen, Dorte Breitenstein Kristensen, Maiken Blok-Wahlgreen and Sophie McMonagle). We look forward to hosting more relevant events this year, and welcome any feedback on subjects you would like to see covered, or the sort of events you would like to attend in the future.

User assistance in software documentation

Matthew Ellison kicked off the lectures with an insightful look at User Assistance, highlighting some common reasons why users don’t get the information they need. He gave us some great (and very simple) hints and tips on getting feedback to help build an effective user experience. It was clear that talking to a sample set of customers really is the best way to understand how to best present your information.

Terminology management

Mark Childress joined us from SAP SE and gave us a view of the journey SAP has made in defining their comprehensive terminology. Terminology is never complete when you support multinational organisations and companies, but ensuring you have a simple process of defining, localising, delivering, and consuming that terminology makes management and overall quality much easier.

Multimodal communication of knowledge

Professor Jan Engberg walked us through one of his projects, exploring multimodal communication of knowledge in web context. We deliver so much content today in media other than the written word, and his findings were fascinating in terms of understanding whether that medium is appropriate to convey the information you want, without providing either redundant or counter-productive knowledge as a side effect. Be careful with your videos that you are not distracting the user by the colour of your shirt!

Communication - just a job or true passion?

Maiken Blok-Wahlgreen gave us a brief history of her interesting career - from pharmaceutical research, to marketing and technical communication. Very few of us start in the same career that we are in today, and Maiken encouraged us to value the skills we acquire and to consider that we are all experts in our field, providing huge benefit to our organisations. The more we can do to advertise our unique skills as technical communicators, the more prevalent and valued we will see the role become.

Thank you to the presenters for their thought-provoking sessions and to all the attendees for making it a very enjoyable and lively event.