Consulting with Your Organization to Improve Your Technical Communication Tools

Success in the technology business over the long-term requires more than just great products. It also requires that your staff is highly proficient in the communication of abstract, technical concepts to many different types of audiences in terms they can easily understand. This fact is especially true for your prospective and existing customers that are targeted by your marketing and support staffs. In other words, the better your organization's technical communication tools are, the more effective you will be at managing your business, getting and keeping new customers, and satisfying your existing customers.

Doing these three things well translates directly into a better bottom line.

Organizations are made up of people from many different backgrounds, and effective technical communication may not be a strong skill for all of them. Yet this skill is crucial to your organization's success as a whole. Filling gaps in your staff's knowledge and skills can help ensure your profits do not leak away.

The following are some examples of technical communication tools you may be using, and how we can help you improve them.

Marketing Presentations

Every organization uses some type of marketing presentation to to explain their products and business proposition to their customers. For technology companies, developing marketing presentations and other documents is both crucial and difficult. It is difficult because just the right technical slant is required without too much technical jargon. Too much technical jargon will confuse the intended audience and the message about product benefits will be lost.

We can help you find and maintain the correct technical slant.

White Papers and Other Core Business Documents

Some audiences require detailed technical explanations of products with almost no information about features and benefits. These audiences want only the technical concepts and the relevant data. White Papers are usually conceptual documents that describe and explain the operating principles of products and their enabling technologies. These kinds of documents require the ability to identify and understand the logical relationships between abstract concepts as well as a general knowledge of science and how to identify appropriate references. We can work with your subject matter experts to help you develop or improve your organization's white papers.

More and more organizations are documenting their core business information and processes, such as policies, procedure steps, and even detailed work instructions, and then incorporating the resulting documents into a network based business management system. They are doing so to make their business information more objective, measurable, and easily available to their staffs, so as to improve management effectiveness and job performance.

Moreover, when an organization's core business activities are documented and such documents are used on a day-to-day basis, core business activities can be more easily measured. This means that how to make improvements to operational procedures and technical communication tools will become evident sooner than if they are not measured and documented. Taking this approach to the business management process on the part of everyone in an organization is an on-going commitment, the ultimate objective of which is customer satisfaction.

Continuously improving core business operations and clarifying technical concepts will lead to continuous improvements in how your organization runs and the products it creates, and that soon will lead to a state known as "Best Practice," the state in which an organization is functioning as effectively as possible to satisfy the needs of its customers.

This is a business strategy that maximizes profits because it is another way of eliminating gaps in knowledge and skills.

We specialize in helping organizations conceptualize, document, and communicate their technical concepts and core business operations so that critical information is all recorded and accessible on the organization's intranet as part of a business management system. We can help you maximize your profits.

Performance Based Training Course Design and Development

As pointed out on the introduction page to our web site, if you and your staff do not have ready answers to the full context of questions about your core business operations, chances are very good that some of your organization's profits are leaking away. For each question you and your staff cannot answer immediately, there is a knowledge gap in someone's mind, and for every knowledge gap there is a corresponding gap in job performance. Each job performance gap leaks away some of your organization's profits.

The performance based training development process identifies and measures gaps in both the knowledge and skills of your staff, and then training courses are developed to fill those gaps. Additional measurements can also confirm the success of the training after its delivery to your staff or customers. This approach ensures seamless level of job performance across your organization that is consistent with your business model.

This is especially true for Technical Support Readiness Training. We can help your engineers solve problems and improve customer satisfaction.

We can help you stop profit leaks as we have for many customers with performance based training.

Document conversion for the Web and Database Development

Many organizations have legacy documents that need to be made available on their intranet. We can help you evaluate and convert such documents to HTML or XML as you may require. We can also help you with small FileMaker Database systems.

Sarbane-Oxley Compliance

Large, public companies must comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) law by the end of their fiscal year in 2004. Many companies that are not required to comply have decided to do so anyway simply to improve their financial controls and the accuracy of their financial reporting.

If you are planning for SOX compliance in the coming year, we can help you by working with your accounting firm(s) and the software vendors of SOX tools you may be using. Once we understand exactly how SOX will be implemented in your organization, we can develop customized SOX training just for you.

How We Will Work with You

Let us help you improve your technical communication tools. The more highly technical and abstract the ideas in your business, the better. We love the challenge of taking complex, hard to understand information from subject matter experts and working with them to translate it into a form your organization can use to improve your communication tools for key audiences.

Here are the steps in a typical project:

• When you contact us, we will respond and ask you for a description of your needs.
• Then, we will set up an initial meeting to evaluate your project.
• Next, we will develop a proposal and exchange it by email until we both agree on a definition of work, a set of project milestones, and payment terms.
• Once an agreement is reached, we will produce an Alpha version of the project deliverables for your review.
• From the results of the Alpha review, we will create a Beta version of the deliverables and then conduct a Beta test to make sure your needs are being satisfied according to the project specifications.
• From the results of the Beta test, we will make additional changes to the deliverables to create a final version of the work product, you will take ownership of the work product, and your project will be completed.
• Optionally, arrangements can be made for maintenance updates to the work product on regular intervals.

  To start your project, just: mailto:greg@blueoakmountaintech.com and send us a brief explanation of what you think your needs are.

  We look forward. to working with you soon.

  < Back to Services

  © Copyright 1998 - 2007, Blue Oak Mountain Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved