Working with SMEs
As a technical writer, we need to communicate with subject matter experts every day. A subject matter expert can be a system manager who plans the function development and knows almost everything about a function, or a team member who works on and knows only one part of the function, for example, a function tester. Communication with SMEs is one interesting part in the technical writing work, because SMEs are people with different characteristics.
Many SMEs from the software development environment have the common traits: direct, serious, logically rigorous, and ineloquent. If we’re lucky enough, a kind and professional SME can provide us with high-quality inputs which are clear and complete with correct grammar. But we can’t always be lucky. Even if the SME is kind and professional, he or she doesn’t know how to do correctly at the beginning when working with a technical writer. We should tell SMEs what kind of inputs are expected by us and ask some questions to digger more information we need.
Sometimes we must face the SMEs who need more trainings and adjustments for our target. I tell you three storis below. Susan, John, and Tom are the SMEs respectively in the storis. All of them are 45 years old with much experience.
Susan is talkative and tells you everything no matter if you want to listen or not. When I reviewed a topic of a document with Susan together. She said: ‘This sentence is not correct. There’s something wrong with the legacy document either. I draw the traffic flows myself. It’s where…’. When I opened the website she mentioned, I saw about ten traffic flows with step descriptions below the flows. I found the target flow and got that it’s more complicated than my original input. What shall we do then? From the story we can see that Susan is not good at organizing the information for writers. She provides negative information. So we should filter out the negative information, remove useless sections, adjust the order and dependency, and piece together all the information. Of course, solid product knowledge is needed to complete all these things.
John is the most experienced SME in the department. He is detail-oriented. He needs more time to review your document and perhaps gives several unimportant comments. He is sometimes critical to others and can make me feel pressure from him. How shall we communicate with him? Firstly, we needn’t be depressed or anxious since it’s not our fault. Secondly, we should be as careful as possible to avoid any mistakes. Thirdly, he is not always so critical, so try to make friends with him and he will be kinder to you. Of course, we should always make sure the quality of documentation.
Tom is very experienced in his engineering work, but has little experience working with a technical writer. He doesn’t know which important function information should be put in which section of a document, but he keeps pushing me, asking when the document will be ready. That’s funny and makes me laugh. I know he is a nice person in daily life, but he needs training and tutoring. He needs several cycles of document releases to know more about the documents and way of working. Isn’t it interesting working with an SME? There’re more stories about them. Some of them are very good at writing after long-term document reviews and coworking with writers. But for others, patience and time is needed.