Technical writing on self-directed teams

Many companies are reorganizing their work forces and encouraging teamwork by creating empowered or self-directed work teams (SDTs). While hardly a new management concept, companies are relying more heavily on teams to deliver competitive, high-quality goods and services. Consequently, employees of these companies find that they must change the way they work, in terms of both organization and process. This paper builds a definition of a genuine team and discusses the potential benefits of putting technical writers on cross-functional, self-directed, development teams. Based on interviews with 6 technical writers, the paper describes their experiences on projects that attempted to use teams, and measures their experiences to the definition of teams. Lastly, the paper attempts to answer the question: How can we create an environment for successful team building in which teams can benefit from the participation of technical writers?