Some of the subpages in my portfolio show work that I did with a single employer for nearly a decade. Some of the subpages present earlier work where I gained the experience to do that work. As you can see from the number of subpages, my work has been varied. Work created for public distribution is presented in its original form. Work that was for internal use is “genericized” to obscure the client for whom I produced the work.

Here is information about OSIsoft to give you context for my work.

OSIsoft is a software company that started in 1980 to create software used in process engineering environments, The software is now used in other industries and environments to gather digital measurements from varied sources and deliver the measurements for use in operations and historical analysis.

A critical success factor for OSIsoft is this connectivity to just about any measurement device and connection protocol. I started work on a three month contract to edit and index documentation for a family of APIs to SAP and other ERPs. I had worked on deployments of ERPs for nearly a decade before that. My work on this initial project was very well received. My manager saw that I had skills that would be useful to the growing company. She had a fulltime opening for a Senior Technical Writer. She hired me.

There were fewer than 300 employees when I started work at OSIsoft. The company had grown to well over 1,000 employees by the time I left.

I was the third member of the technical writing team. Historically, software developers had written “user documentation” with occasional support from a contract writer. The first technical writer was hired when the company was about ten years old. A second writer came on about a year before I did.

A few months after I joined the company I attended training on the company’s report writer product. My comment that the documentation was difficult to understand landed me a major rewrite project.

I spent nearly seven years on the tech pubs team. As the company grew and the software developers increasingly valued our work, the tech pubs team grew and subdivided. There are now dozens of people building on the technical communications base that I helped to pioneer. There are now teams of writers, user experience engineers, and localization engineers – and administrators to manage the systems that the teams use to do their work. Among other things, I contributed to:

• Style guide
• Translation word list
• Component Content Management System
• Departmental procedures that raised the bar on the effectiveness and quality of our work
• Training colleagues

I spent my last three years at OSIsoft as part of the proposals team, where in addition to responding to competitive bids, I contributed to the team infrastructure in many of the same ways as I had in tech pubs.