Control Freak

Imagine I am holding my hands out in front of me, two feet apart and imagine that represents all the work an average technical team does. Then think about just how much your customers actually get to see. For me I think that is about the last two inches. So we have all that effort, all the brilliance, all the achievement and yet apart from those in the technical team, nobody ever gets to hear about it.

My answer to this is a strategy for exposing this wealth of hidden experience and expertise. For me this means doing the following two things, running a technical blog and getting people onto the presentation circuit. In this article I am only going to cover the former – the power of the technical blog.

First of all let me get the basics out of the way. Blog software that a whole team can use is easy to come by, we use WordPress and hosting server should be easy for a technical team, but if not then go to a cheap hosting company and it can be yours for a fiver a month. There should be no practical barrier to doing it.

The purpose of the blog is for my team to document the technical things they do that nobody would normally find out about. So that ranges from:

• Documenting that great OS bug they found that required a special patch from the manufacturer
• Describing the correct configuration for that obscure piece of software that they had to struggle to find out
• Recording the results of some testing they did on a new piece of kit
• Sharing the things the things they learnt on a technical conference
• Promoting that great technical idea they have that manufacturers should all be adopting

and so on. I’m repeating myself, but basically anything that is technical and would otherwise not be seen, goes.

I don’t authorise the articles in advance, or even know about them until they are published. If fact, I only have two rules that I ask of people:

1. It must be about a technical subject
2. It must not be too rude

The next step is marketing the blog. Now, provided you are sticking to the purpose above and you don’t want to use it for product marketing, you can simply brand it as a peek into the work of the technical team. Then, link to a relevant article wherever the opportunity arises. In fact it is generally preferable not to repeat too much of an article in another context as people might not follow the link.  I tend to check the referrer stats to see just how much traffic has been generated by the placement of a link.

The trickier element is ensuring that the titles of the articles, the way they are written and the categorisation given, meet with search engine requirements to ensure that our articles appear at the top on focussed searches. But so long as people stick to the plan and write one article at a time then this should get better over time.

Once the initial internal promotion to a sceptical technical team is out of the way I find myself left with very little work to do. I have to remind people, when they are near to completing an important piece, that now is the best time to blog it. I have to check categorisation and add or change categories as needed to cope with the changing nature of the articles. I check the web stats to see what groups are reading it. Finally I avidly check it every day to see if there is something new.

The power of a technical blog is that it makes the work of the team transparent, it establishes credibility for the team, it gives them the recognition they deserve and it builds a community. It also makes great reading. Priceless.

jay Leadership, Technology