BA vs Technical BA vs Technical Writer

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So am I a Business Analyst, a Technical Business Analyst or a Technical Writer?

My goal is to be a Technical Writer. As I think I mentioned, the project manager I am working with has acknowledged my writing ability and as such leans on me to polish the presentations we are making.

They hired me as a straight business analyst. So I am creating questions in order to develop process maps for the government area that has hired me.

Interestingly a huge amount of technical writing is process mapping. It was a large part of what I did at Enbridge, sit down with the SCADA programmers, record what they did; I generally video the chat as the SCADA programmer displayed the steps and I asked the questions that displaying the process didn’t catch. Then I write the process document – effectively a very detailed ‘how to’, send it back to the SCADA Programmer, who would read it through and leave comments. I’d make changes, get one of the other technical writers to read it over. Then it would go to the SCADA Manager and he would read and approve it.

Rinse. Repeat.

You know what the difference is in being a business analyst and a technical writer – the type of document and the amount of detail being written. I prefer being a technical writer. I like to get into the meat of things. But the interviewing, the documentation of processes – same skills, different use.

Oddly, this reminds me of the argument I often had with my SCADA programming friends. They would say “It’s a SCADA system.” I would say “It’s a database being used for a different purpose.” The back end, it was good old MSSQL (now Azure). It’s why understanding what I was writing was easy for me. I’d programmed with it for years.

At Enbridge, I set up a JIRA/Confluence site to manage documentation. At this position, I will be using SharePoint (I just volunteered to take this on). I used SharePoint at Enbridge as well, but I didn’t need to manage it there. I set up an entire reporting request engine on SharePoint for TELUS. (A lot of places would hire a Technical Business Analyst for this job – because I can actually administer it and do some programming with both JIRA/Confluence and SharePoint.)

I was told that no one hires a generalist any longer. If I want to be a Technical Writer, everything has to convince people I am a Technical Writer.

Maybe it’s the same as the old ‘SCADA vs. database used for a different purpose’ argument.