When the request for my profile in INDUS came earlier this week, I had mixed feelings. While I felt deeply honoured, I questioned myself if I truly deserved to be featured here. All credits to Naveen for convincing me successfully to pen my profile down.
I spent my childhood in all corners of the country as my father had a transferable job. That gave me a unique perspective to respect and appreciate different cultures and diversity that we have in our country. I feel privileged because it allowed me to understand and appreciate how each of us could be so different, yet so compatible. After my graduation from NIT Surat, I worked with the Operations Research Group for a couple of years, and then decided to join Novell when it was setting up the India Development Centre.
I have been with Novell for more than 16 years and am working as the Director of Engineering for the NetIQ products. These include products from the Virtualization, Security Management, and the Business Service Management domains. Besides these, I’ve also been managing the open source projects at Novell IDC for the last 10 years.
Although I have been associated with the technical communication function for almost two decades, I got involved more directly since 2005 when I started heading the technical writing function at Novell IDC. At Novell IDC, we have a big team of writers and services like documentation production and graphics designing. This gave me an opportunity to work closely with the STC India organization. This helped me realize the trends in the technical writing industry.
As part of my role, I work on enhancing the competencies of the technical writing teams at Novell IDC. This includes both the product related skills as well as the skills related to technical writing. We use various methods like reading relevant books and discussing them in the teams, conduct in-house skill development workshops, and so on. I personally recommend reading “Developing Quality Technical Information” (IBM Press) to all the folks who are involved in technical writing.
I also focus on enabling stronger working relationships between the IDC and the global writing teams. This is becoming increasingly critical as we look at building more and more multi-shore teams.
We are also looking at how the writers can get involved in the value added services. I am particularly excited about the opportunity that we have in the space of user experience. I feel that the writers can play an important role in being an interface between a “real user” and the engineering teams. I recently bought a copy of “Rocket Surgery Made Easy” by Steve Krug for all our writers and am looking forward to an opportunity to discuss their observations from this book.
I have been associated with the STC India organization for the last several years. I have been fortunate to host several STC study meets at Novell over the last years. I look forward to seeing all of you at Novell again as we would be hosting the STC India pre-conference workshop in just a few weeks from now.
You can contact Parag at pgoel@novell.com
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