Patrick Remington

Background

About Patrick Remington

In my 42 year career at IBM, I have worked in several positions. My longest and most recent work was documenting IBM software. I have seen tools and processes change regularly, helping me to gain a very valuable in-depth knowledge of what it is we do and why we do it. I am deeply familiar with the IBM tool set (specifically the ID Workbench, including both the Arbortext and Oxygen editors, and all associated tools, guidelines, and processes that go along with it). I have extensive knowledge in both SGML and Dita, and excel at troubleshooting errors in either source format. In addition to the ID Workbench and the associated IBM ID tools, I am experienced with a broad set of tools including Arbortext editor, Oxygen editor, Adobe Acrobat, Word, Excel, Symphony, Powerpoint, Notepad++, OpenOffice, Filezilla, Visual SlickEdit, MS Paint, HyperSnap, Rational Team Concert, and, to a lesser extent, CorelDraw and Lotus 123. For the last 9 years, I have been an Information Development team lead for a group of documentation professionals. My strengths are primarily in project planning, communication with product programmers, and coordination (including translation). As a team lead, I have always made sure that I had writing assignments in addition to my project lead and planning responsibilities to stay involved with the work that my team was doing, to better keep me in touch with the nuances of the release as it progressed, and to keep my writing skills current. I can easily step into the role of technical writer when needed but leadership, project planning and project coordination are now my strongest skills. My approach to documentation has always been to find the most efficient and cost effective way to provide the customer with the information they need, to provide it in the format that best serves their needs and to deliver it in a timely manner.