User Documentation Sub-Team Retrospective 2019/2020

The sub-team established a work plan to guide the work for the fiscal year, which helped to frame the team’s work and meetings better.

The sub-team set up baseline workflows and assignments that will facilitate meeting user-submitted and system update changes to the manual.

The sub-team took steps to create a help center style guide, which would create consistency and clarity in presentation of information to users of the user manual.

Sub-team members received introductory training to Confluence to help with navigating sub-team documentation, as well as making updates to documentation in the help center.

There was one major project, in particular, that was not completed as planned – the help center style guide. This document will be important in a manual review and revision, as well in the creation of new documentation.

Meeting deadlines was a challenge for this team. Scoping projects and discrete milestones and timelines for completion would help. It might also be beneficial to have the co-chairs lead impactful and time-sensitive projects, while providing leadership opportunities to sub-team members that leverage their specific skills.

The sub-team should work to establish a field in Jira to tag development requests that will eventually require documentation in the user manual.