Further information on entries and winners appears in the Winter issue of Communicator of the same year. Online issues of Communicator are available to ISTC members only after logging in.

UK Technical Communication Awards

The winners were announced at the recent Gala Dinner of the TCUK Conference, hosted by the ISTC. Six companies, with contributors from multiple countries, were recognised for the quality of their entries, and one received the Overall Winner Award.

IBM Event Streams Team – Documentation Site

Their IBM Event Streams Documentation Site was also recognised as the Overall Winner.

Overall feedback from the judges

“The ambition and context of your entry are clear. Your team has been able to produce an outstanding and thoroughly engaging documentation site. It feels modern and welcoming, encourages exploring without getting lost, and makes useful information easy to find and understand.”

See the live IBM Event Streams documentation site.

Salman Rashid, Karen Lewis, Jon Arter and Alison Till – Clearbank Knowledge Centre

Overall feedback from the judges

“Throughout, the content is clearly and consistently written, easy to understand and navigate. The content model within the how to topics looks really clear and intuitive. The pattern you have created, and the combination of text, graphical flow, table and video looks like an engaging and flexible mix, that builds trust and works hard to ensure users can achieve the task and remember how they did it.”

Kosan Crisplant Lanka (Pvt) Ltd – LPG Cylinder Filling Systems Manuals

Overall feedback from the judges

“The brief is comprehensive and clearly represents the processes of a highly professional technical communication team. From the information hierarchy, to the content models and patterns used throughout the range of documents, there has clearly been a great deal of thought put into how the documents would be used, and the critical role clarity plays in supporting these complex pieces of equipment.”

platformOS – Developer Portal

Overall feedback from the judges

“This is an outstanding example of how technical product documentation can work as an integrated part of the product, the teams that create it and the community that uses it. The technical communication ‘team’ is everyone in the business and many out in the partner and user communities. But the only way that ‘team’ can produce the quality they have is through strong leadership driving through a carefully considered strategy.”

See the live platformOS Developer Portal.

Certikit – GDPR and ISO27001 Toolkits

Overall feedback from the judges

“These Microsoft document-based toolkits are excellent examples of technical communication as the final product, rather than being about a product. The toolkits provide all the information organisations are likely to need to implement an Information Security Management System, or to comply with the new GDPR data privacy rules. The overall look and feel is clear and professional.”

Terry Howard – ACM Systems Team, Babcock (DST) – Acoustic Countermeasure Launcher Assembly

Overall feedback from the judges

“This entry has been thoroughly and carefully explained, setting out both the technical and business context, and clearly laying out the journey Babcock have been on to introducing professional technical communication capability. A great deal of thought has gone into how to achieve significant improvements to the suite of manuals. This is particularly striking given the constraints of the current editing and publishing limitations. Provision has been made for the potential to transition to a more best-practice toolset in future based on S1000D.”