By Marilyn Woelk | Senior Member
As a continuation of my September 2015 Intercom article, Jack (or Jill) of All Trades, I want to tell you how this “Jill” has gone through an evolution in tech comm. I want to help others who have experienced the “Who Moved My Cheese?” scenario and are wondering where to go next.
I should start by giving you the background on my evolution. I have managed ~24 employees and subcontractors and spent time working in business process improvement, change management, marketing, information design, publications process, and localization. My business stayed on the same trajectory for about 12 years, but then several factors reoriented my direction.
My business “right-sized” over the years as the economy shifted. My clients changed how they contracted for services. As a result, I had fewer projects and didn’t rehire subcontractors to new projects or replace staff. Eventually, I went back to my earlier business model (working out of my home office instead of a commercial office space, and hiring subcontractors instead of employees).
In 2005, I stepped out of the techcomm profession in order to manage medical staff (five nurses and CNAs) for four aging relatives. This involved using all of my management and communication skills and gave me a great background for medical writing, but it was too time consuming and unpredictable to combine with project work in tech comm. In 2012, I began to work again with a few small clients in marketing communications, event planning, editing, and promotion on projects in insurance and investments (involving regulatory compliance) and book projects, including a medical book.
These small projects helped me embrace technology that I had abandoned while on sabbatical from the profession. I was publishing books on Amazon for my clients, attending and speaking at STC conferences, and beginning to market my business again.
The challenges I faced moving forward included:
- “Cold” project leads.
- The need to catch up on new technology.
- The need to catch up on new processes, which had changed dramatically due to the explosion of social media, blogs, collaborative work teams, virtual teams, and iterative development processes like Agile.
- The desire to work at the same professional level but with-
out the employees, office space, or a workforce to manage. - The desire to work from home and to maintain my status as a vendor and not just a contract worker.
Fast forward to today. This “Jill” has found a great fit with a Fortune 500 client who needed a communications person to support high-level enterprise-wide deployments of software that would streamline processes for all employees. The position came from a project lead with a previous client. My position requires a knowledge of:
- Business development and processes
- Software and technical subjects
- Branding and graphics development
- Change management
- Global factors (translation and localization for multiple countries)
- User audiences (executive, management, and employee)
My “cheese” has been moved in the following ways. In this position, I am less of a “Lone Ranger” and more integrated with the team’s activities. The project is managed in another country. I work on a virtual global team with members (most of whom I’ve never met) in several U.S. states, the United Kingdom, India, and a long list of other deployment countries. We live in different time zones, the way we spell and the languages we use differ, as do our work processes. I am integrated into a team (and not managing it) for the first time in a long time as the communications lead. I have also learned new technology and processes that enabled our virtual communication and work. I have learned more about doing business with diverse cultures and planning for mass communications rollouts in multiple languages.
The project is affected by software changes, laws in multiple countries, and hardware and connectivity situations in various locations. Our work product is new, so the model is refined constantly as we discover the path forward. The development schedules are rapid and the timelines are always evolving. The project is full of constantly moving targets.
Some deliverables are reviewed by high-level executives. The traditional draft-and-review process does not apply, especially since we are capturing software changes and other information iteratively. Often the communications revision process involves compiling comments or discussing changes with the virtual team via email or Web meetings (and sometimes editing or rewriting things “live” in those meetings). And because of the global nature of the product, time zones may affect meeting times.
Each communication can have over 50-100 versions (four to eight versions per country based on one communication being modified for four different audiences times one or two business units). The number and type of communications varies based on the product being launched, and there can be 100+ communications times 15-80 countries times 3-4 audiences per country. Based on the product, communications will be delivered in 5-15 languages.
The bottom line is that this “Jill” has landed a job doing what she loves: complexity, creativity, strategic planning, technology, change management, and solutions building. And I still write. I still check out software configurations. I still have my own consulting business. I still do work for other clients who have longer timelines. Ah yes, this is just enough “chaos” to keep this Jill of All Trades happy. I hope that you find your cheese, too!
