Tips for Effective and Efficient meeting with SMEs

SMEs are integral part of our day to day jobs and are our main source of information, apart from the System Requirement Documents, Product Requirement Document, Design document and other innumerable sources available to us to provide technically accurate documents.

Often times the technical documents available are filled with Jargons or written in very colloquial  language, which is very difficult for end user to decipher, this is where we come to rescue and form a bridge between SMEs and end users.

I have been working as a Technical writer from the past 16 yrs and worked with different types of SMEs and different work cultures. And most often I have felt SMEs are not very supportive and it becomes difficult to collect inputs from them.

Here are some of the tips which I would like to provide to help gather information from SMEs:

• Always keep a draft ready from the available resources before approaching the SME. Do your homework from the resources available, such as, Design document etc. I have noticed that people are more enthusiastic to correct your mistake then to provide content from scratch.
• Collate all the questions and set up a face to face meeting and discuss all the questions.
• Get access to the WebUI and try to run the procedures on your own and then come up with the procedure before asking the SME/tester to provide your the inputs. Be more involved and try to suggest some changes to the GUI look and feel and provide improvements when possible.
• Participate in weekly/daily stand ups to get more understanding of the features developed in the current release.

This were some of my understanding based on my experience and time tested.

Please let me know in the comments if you have any more suggestions.