by Jen O Neill Outsourcing manufacturing is big business. Many companies today use the services of other companies to make, even design, some of their products as it can provide them with needed components or products without owning and operating a factory to do this work themselves. The benefits are cost savings, improving time to [...]
by Jen O Neill Working for an American multinational company with technical writing colleagues on both coasts of the US and me in Belgium, you’d think I’d be watching the clock to see when they’re in the office so that we can talk. Nope. I’m not watching the Instant Messager screen on my computer to [...]
Continue reading about What’s the most important time zone in Europe?
by Jen O Neill I’ve been thinking about the recent travel chaos that hit Europe and North America over Christmas when air travel practically came to a standstill for days due to the snow. Like many, I was stranded and sought information everywhere and anywhere in an attempt to figure out when I might be [...]
by Jen O Neill Earlier this year, Tom Johnson in his blog “I’d Rather Be Writing” discussed the issue of documentation ownership. He had recently handed over the source files of several manuals he had done to an internal client and felt that the manuals had been “stolen” from him. He acknowledged that it was [...]
Continue reading about Sharing our source files with other companies
by Jen O Neill I’ve been reading up recently on agile environments. I don’t work in such an environment but have been struck at how often they discuss the importance of the office layout to encourage collaboration in a team. The preferred layout always cited is the open plan office. The layout of the workplace [...]
by Jennifer O Neill I work in the manufacturing sector and many of our products are outsourced to suppliers for development and manufacture, to be sold under our company’s brand name. The English terms I come across in the software and manuals that I check can often be amusing in their originality. A Chinese supplier [...]
by Jennifer O Neill We work with words. Yet we handle numbers too in our work. And what I’ve noticed from working with manuals written by both professional and non-professional writers across many countries, sometimes with English as second language, is that often the cultural roots of the writer can be seen in how they [...]