Doc sprints at STC Summit 2013 – the presentation

This week I’m attending STC Summit 2013, the annual conference of the Society for Technical Communication. I’ll blog about the sessions I attend, and give you some links to other news I hear about too. You’ll find my posts under the tag stc13 on this blog.

Today it was my turn to stand up on stage, knees quaking, watching people enter the room, and hoping what I had to say would be useful to them.

Overview

My presentation is called Doc Sprints: The Ultimate in Collaborative Document Development. It focuses on planning and running a doc sprint, and how doc sprints are useful in developing the documentation our readers need.

It also includes a number of stories and tips, gleaned from doc sprinters around the world. Thanks to Anne Gentle, Swapnil Ogale, Ellis Pratt, Katya Stepalina, Andreas Spall, Jay Meissner, and Peter Lubbers, for contributing their ideas!

What’s in the presentation

The presentation covers these topics:

• Introduction to doc sprints, agile environments, and why a doc sprint is a good fit for technical documentation.
• Who to invite, when to start, and how to ensure that the sprint will produce the documents you need.
• How to get the best out of the sprinters.
• Collaborative tools for use during the sprint.
• Sprinting across the world: Handling multiple time zones, early sprinters, late sprinters.
• How to run a retrospective, and why.
• Reviewing and publishing the documents, and writing up the results.
• Other innovative types of sprints for documentation teams.

Getting the slides

You can watch or download the slides from SlideShare:

Feedback from attendees

There were plenty of questions, both during and after the session, which is great. People came up and told me they enjoyed the presentation. That’s very very nice to hear.

There were also quite a few tweets during the session. This has to be my favourite, from Stephanie Donovan:

Stephanie’s tweet

If you see any blog posts or reviews appearing, let me know. And thanks so much to everyone for being such a great audience!