STC Delhi Regional Conference, August 2017

By, Manisha Khurana

In today’s fast changing world, you need to keep yourself up-to-date with latest insights to deliver the best work. The conference hosted by STC India Delhi chapter on August 12 at Comfort Villa, Gurugram helped the participants with just those latest insights. The conference was sponsored by Nagarro. People from all across India joined the conference. Though the expected count of the participants was less to begin with, it grew as the sessions rolled on.

The regional conference started at 10:30 a.m. and Manisha Khurana, Delhi (NCR) City Representative, addressed the attendees with the welcome note.

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Piyush Singh started with the first session of the day. He presented his thoughts on Product Management view on Product Content. It was a brilliant session and encouraged the attendees to strengthen the focus on audience analysis and believe about writing as a faculty of communication to ensure that business objectives are met through product’s content.

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Dr. Anu Singh followed with a session on Product Documentation-Look Beyond Product.  This was again an interactive session and focused on writing techniques for product documentation.

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Next, Padma Swaroop presented an idea of eliminating peer review and implementing “Peer Review in Pairs” for better documentation in Agile model in his session on Efficient Review Process for Better Documentation in Agile Model.

As the saying goes, every cloud has a silver lining. And the time taken to solve the problem is inversely proportional to the number of times we faced that problem.

Namrata Malhotra, the speaker of the fourth session, came with a pioneering solution of a problem she encountered while developing content for her client and provided some lessons learnt in her session on “Out-of-the-box Content Delivery”.

Rajeev Jain then took the floor to talk on Managing Global/Virtual Teams. He revealed some ideas for managers on developing the efficiency of team members.

If you ever faced an issue in localizing content, this session was meant for you. The penultimate speaker of the day was Salil Vaidya who conducted a session on Localizable Technical Writing. He provided a variety of tips for creating content that can be localized accurately and quickly. Last, but not the least, the youngest presenter among all was Rinni Mahajan. She conducted a session on “Working with APIs- Guide for Technical Writers”. The topics she covered were WHAT IS AN API, WHY DO WE NEED IT, and HOW TO PREPARE API DOCUMENTS.

The conference, with the support of all the attendees, came to be an effective place for learning new concepts and networking with other technical communicators. Must say that it cannot be called as a sacrificial weekend; it rather turned out to be a cognitive process of acquiring knowledge.

About the Author

Manisha Khurana, STC DCSA award recipient, has 12 years of experience in technical communication. In addition, she has experience in usability analysis and instructional design. She has worked with telecom and VAS organizations for about nine years. Currently, she is working as Senior Manager for a VAS organization.

Apart from her full-time employment, she is voluntarily associated with STC India as Delhi (NCR) City Representative. She has also served STC India as Secretary (2012), Vice President (2013), President (2014) and Immediate Past President (2015). She is also a proud recipient of the STC DCSA award. If you are interested in sponsoring a session, speaking at a session or attending such sessions in Delhi (NCR), you can write to her at manisha.khurana@gmail.com.