Technical writing is a collaborative process that involves several experts such as developers, quality assurance engineers, and product managers. These experts are often organized in scrum teams. Many technical writers either are part of a scrum team or closely work with scrum teams. If you are such a technical writer, adapting your writing process to scrum can help you in effective time and project management. 

What is scrum?

Many organizations use the scrum methodology for their product development. Scrum teams plan their work around sprints – the unit of time measurement in scrum. The scrum team collectively decides what it will get done during a sprint and achieve those goals at the end of the sprint. The team conducts the following four events or ceremonies to achieve their goals:

1. Monthly sprint planning: deciding goals for a given month.
2. Weekly sprints: dividing monthly goals into weekly tasks.
3. Daily stand-ups: conducting daily meetings to share progress and discuss roadblocks.
4. Monthly retrospective: assessing the past month’s progress and evaluating what went well and wrong.

See What is scrum?

Typical technical writing process

The process of creating technical documentation can differ across organizations or even writers. However, a typical technical writing process involves seven steps:

1. Research: learning more about the topic you’re writing about, the audience you’re writing for, and the document you’re creating.
2. First draft: writing first draft based on your research.
3. Review: having experts review the draft for accuracy and completeness.
4. Revise: making necessary changes to the draft based on the review feedback.
5. Repeat: repeating the process until the draft is complete and accurate.
6. Prepare for publication: editing the content, moving it to your publishing platform, and getting it ready for publication.
7. Sign-off: having a person in-charge approve the document for publication.

Depending on the complexity of the document, the technical writing process can span across weeks or months. See Typical technical writing process. 

Adapting technical writing process to scrum

This is an example of how you can adapt the seven steps of the technical writing process to a scrum environment: 

Monthly sprint planning

Before you plan your work, estimate how much time you will need to complete the document. Estimate how much research you need to do, availability of resources such as developers and test environments, and time needed for the review process. Check with your team about deadlines. Also accommodate for holidays, different time zones, and unexpected roadblocks. 

Large documents such as user guides will take several months, especially if you are working alone. But if it is just one section of the guide, you may be able to complete it within a month or two. Short documents such as a procedure can be completed within a month.   

For lengthy documents, aim to complete one step a month – researching the topic in the first month, writing the first draft next month, getting it reviewed the month after that, and so on. For medium-size documents, two or more steps may be completed in a month. Short documents such as a stand-alone help article can be finished in a month. 

Depending on what you reasonably aim to achieve in a month, create a monthly goal during the monthly sprint planning meeting. 

Weekly sprints

Once you have created a monthly goal, break it down into smaller goals that can be achieved in a week. For example, if you are planning to write the first draft in a month with four weeks in it, your weekly goals would look like this:

• First week: prepare an outline.
• Second week: write.
• Third week: write, add images, links, etc.
• Fourth week: proofread and have the draft ready for review.

If you are planning to get the entire article done in a month, your weekly goals would look like this:

• First week: research and start writing the first draft.
• Second week: finish the first draft and send it for review.
• Third week: get the review done and revise the draft based on the feedback, send for another review.
• Fourth week: finalize the draft, prepare for publication, get sign-off.

Daily stand-ups

Writing technical documentation involves many people with different expertise. Although you are the person who is doing all the writing, you will still need help from members of your team, other teams, or even other departments. Daily stand-up is an excellent place to ask for help. For example, if you need the draft reviewed by a developer, you can ask them to add that task on their next week’s to-do list aka weekly sprint.   

Sprint retrospective

Scrum retrospective is a meeting where the scrum team assesses successes and failures of the month. You can use this opportunity to evaluate what worked in your favor and how you can continue repeating it. You should also take a look at what didn’t work and why, and then figure out how to avoid such situations.

Using scrum for writing can help you better manage your time and workload. It can help you anticipate your project timeline, which consequently can help you request time and resources from other team members well in advance. It means both you and your team can achieve your goals without feeling overwhelmed or having to rush at the last minute.