Report from the Field

Lee Ann (Hurt) Lay, B. A., M. A.
Class of 1999

My title is Senior Technical Writer/Project Lead at Captiva Software Corporation, www.captivasoftware.com, a leading software developer for input management solutions in San Jose, California. I have been with Captiva for almost two years.

My main obligation is to ensure that the writers on my team meet their deadlines and produce high quality installation guides, online help, release notes, and user manuals. To help them, I perform a variety of tasks each day. I perform peer edits, deconstruct the meanings of software bugs, create documentation plans, negotiate deadlines with the other teams, help with determining logical organization for collateral, create templates for future releases, test existing documentation, attend product meetings, and sometimes write procedures or overview material.

The IT industry is very deadline-driven, so it seems that technical writers are always working toward a release date. Captiva has different product families, so it's not unusual for me to focus on several different products with overlapping releases at one time.