Team Lead
IBM Canada, Ottawa, ON 2023 – 2025
- Advocated for documentation team in cross-functional meetings.
- Managed Jira project; assigned work to writers; monitored progress toward project milestones.
- Supervised team of three writers for two major Cognos Analytics software releases and several minor releases, for example, IBM Cognos Analytics 12.1.0.
- Mentored two junior writers; trained them on authoring and publishing processes; edited their work; gave them feedback – both positive and constructive.
- Championed documentation by posting in Slack, speaking up in high-visibility meetings, and producing high-quality documentation.
- Demonstrated a new embedded help system to development and support teams.
- Synchronized the publishing of final documentation with other deliverables on the GA date.
Senior Content DeveloperCognos | IBM Canada, Ottawa, ON 2001 – 2025
- Led by example, earning the trust of colleagues.
- Researched, wrote, and delivered on schedule clear and accurate IBM Cognos information products in HTML5 and PDF formats.
- Created architecture diagrams that illustrated, for example, IBM Cognos Analytics for Jupyter Notebook Server and IBM Cloud Object Storage.
- Coordinated the deployment and maintenance of documentation suites of more than 20 IBM products.
- Improved product usability by providing UI text during the design phase.
- Collaborated effectively with Product Management, Development, Quality Control, Support, and Globalization teams.
- Created end-user product videos.
- Improved customer experience by 1) helping to identify common issues that generated support calls and then 2) writing troubleshooting topics with workarounds.
- Communicated seamlessly with teammates around the world.
- Learned and documented complex technologies.
- Adapted to many changes in process and tools. Some examples are: source control systems (VSS > Perforce > internal FileNet system > GitHub); issue tracking systems (RTC > Jira); and authoring tools (FrameMaker > Arbortext > Oxygen > Adobe Experience Manager).
Technical WriterBNR | Nortel, Ottawa, ON 1988 – 2001
- Designed and authored user cards and maintenance guides for a small business phone system.
- Wrote context-sensitive help about CAD/CAM software for a circuit board design system.
- Authored user guides for several internal software products.
- Wrote proposals for the business development of Internet Data Centers.
