Tana Franko, two-time speaker at the Write The Docs NA conference, will preview her upcoming talk to the Writers UA conference in October. Here's her abstract:

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Design is knowing which ones to keep.” – Scott Adams

Technical communicators are increasingly called upon to use design thinking to stay competitive in the corporate landscape of the information age.

Discover how we experimented with, designed, and implemented Agile processes within our extended writing team:

Gathering and utilizing metrics in a continually changing landscape.Marketing your job function within the larger team – why and how?Achieving balance in a continually changing environment.

Our major challenge was to build a new help knowledge base for cloud services under continuous development.

All of the writers on the team came from waterfall projects. We support multiple development teams, all using different sets of tools.

Tana's bio:

Tana Franko works with an international team of technical writers directly supporting Cisco Spark, a recent Cisco Systems innovation to facilitate collaboration. Her areas of expertise and interest include technical writing, user assistance, and quality assurance. Her passion is designing effective user-centered communications. Tana draws on 17 years of directly related experience with Cisco Systems.

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As before, you should be able to get to the 5th floor just before 6pm. We'll eat, drink, and network until about 6:30, when we'll get started.