At some point in your technical writing career, you may find yourself in a position where you are responsible not only for your own output, but also the output of other writers under you. In other words, you’ve become a manager. Some typical scenarios where you find yourself in the role of supervisor or manager:
- You work in a large company with a reasonably sized technical writing team. At some point you may be promoted to senior technical writer, or technical learning lead, with the responsibility of training new junior writers, starting on the path to Learning & Development Manager in charge of an entire department.
- You’re the lone technical writer in a smaller company. You need to convince the company to temporarily or permanently bring in another writer to help manage the content, and you’ll need to manage his output.
Regardless of how this occurs, now you need to manage the output of others, and your focus is going to change to at least some degree. You’ll need to acquire an additional awareness of the overall technical writing process in the company and how it is impacted by company politics, as well as advanced knowledge of the other departments’, or of the client’s, personnel and processes. Of course, you’ll need to do this while continuing to deliver the documentation yesterday!!
