Darlene Richard
Northbridge
Summary
Professional Summary
Experienced as a senior technical writer, business analyst and learning experience designer in highly regulated, compliance-oriented, legal and commercial environments for the private and public sectors.
Key skills and achievements, include:
· Expert at ‘translating’ complex information into digestible 'Plain English' to ensure easy understanding and confident action for users and customers.
· Successfully directed a project to ISO 9001 certification, worked in and met ISO 14001, 27001 and the Australian Qualifications Framework standards (ASQA).
· Skilled at collaborating and extracting complex information from stakeholders and subject matter experts one-on-one and in group workshops.
· Reviews and analyses requirements, creates scoping documents, statements of work and proposes schedules, metrics, simulations, gamification programs and establishes and maintains best practices for document standards and knowledge management.
· Able to lead a team, be part of a team or work alone using strong problem-solving skills, adaptability, creativity and results-oriented mindset.
Senior Technical Writer
· Industries and sectors: ICT, data and digital transformation, incident management, root cause analysis, legal/ regulatory compliance, human resources, organization design, change management, workplace health and safety, medical, water management infrastructure, engineering, transportation, business operations, aerospace, industrial food service and project management.
· Types of documents: policies, frameworks, processes, procedures, proposals, how-to guides, work instructions, user manuals, change management documents, training programs/ aids, learning experience design, tender responses, reports, blog articles, manuscript preparation and publication, presentations and change-promotion materials.
· Seasoned learning experience designer – created a tranche of 66 business/ customer service/ help desk workshops and a 10 short courses series for the Australian Institute of Management (AIM) with expertise in researching, outlining and drafting learning experiences, campaigns and tools for successful/ ‘sticky’ online and face-to-face learning
Overview
11
11
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Senior technical writer
TAFE NSW
01.2025 - Current
- Writing, reviewing and editing policy and procedure documents for intranet and documents stored within ServiceNow and SharePoint.
Senior Learning Experience Designer/ BA
Customer Science
05.2024 - 01.2025
- Worked as 2-IC to the Functional Lead/ Business Lead to establish foundations for a multi-year, federal government, telephony transformation project. Established document management policy, team and project orientation/ onboarding resources and completed the refinement of the high-level training strategy and plan to ensure a firm foundation for the team.
Senior BA/ Tech Writer
UTS - Philanthropic Program
07.2023 - 12.2023
- Supported PMO and worked with subject matter experts across the university to:
- Review previously created materials and audit requirements to formalize donation management efforts
- Analyse, uplift, and create new supporting processes, procedures, and documentation.
- Review, socialise and finalise documents
- Establish knowledge management parameters for document availability and currency
- Create an overall, Advancement manual and work instructions for donation management
- Wrote new procedures for introductory training
- Designed the initial SharePoint central repository for easy access of documents.
BA/ Technical Writer
Macquarie Group – Data Transformation
05.2023 - 07.2023
- Planned and established a central resource of information in Confluence, to prepare senior executives and management to introduce staff to new customer data management strategy. To organisation primarily to:
- Support executives/ management as they explained the changes to their staff
- Socialize changes from the new data transformation project
Lead Tech Writer
Tech Mahindra – Digital Transformation Project
01.2023 - 06.2023
- Established standards for formatting and creation of all documents and ensured easy access from a central location, including:
- Statements of work, terms of reference
- High-level design documents, reports, and presentations
- Templates and definitions
Senior Business Process Analyst
WaterNSW – Transformation/ Process Engineering/ Flood Operations
09.2021 - 11.2022
- Defined a standard baseline of operational business processes to enable continuous improvement in delivery of customer service and stakeholder value.
- For Flood Operations reviewed, organised, and clarified document strategy, protocol, and created training and support documents for potential emergency/ offline situations
- Worked remotely to explore existing written resources and capture historic wisdom
- Worked closely with legal and compliance to ensure documents were in Plain English and accurate to efficiently and effectively build confidence in new users
- Workshopped with subject matter experts and legal teams to clarify and re-write flood incident operational manuals, protocols and work instructions, including for emergencies/ offline incidents
- Established and maintained standard processes and templates for creation, storage and updating of flood operation resources.
BA/ Senior Technical Writer
Commonwealth Bank of Australia - ServiceNow Transition
03.2021 - 05.2021
- Established policy, standard, procedure for redesign of IT service management catalogue, published and linked all practice assets to improve the user experience
- Reviewed and uplifted knowledge articles for incident, problem, and service request
- Developed training plans, job aids and e-learning collateral to support incident, problem, root cause analysis and service request management
- Improved standards of practice assets in the staff IT knowledge base.
BA/ Tech Writer
WaterNSW—Assessments & Approvals
03.2020 - 03.2021
- Explored ‘as is’ processes through (virtual) workshops, analysed and encouraged improvements to simplify, clarify and serve customers more cost-effectively
- Wrote documents to support the management of the infrastructure and licensing for taking and using water throughout the state
- Worked with subject matter experts and legal teams to clarify and write Plain English work instructions, templates, manuals
- Established and maintained standard processes for creation, storage and updating of enterprise and associated agencies documents.
Technical Writer/ Organisation Design/ Change Analyst
TAFE NSW – SRMS Project - Enterprise Performance & Excellence
03.2019 - 11.2019
- Worked with the Organisation Design team to:
- Oversee and support new organisation designs, HR and WHS policies and procedures
- Ensure tools were well-crafted and functional
- Create effective and efficient workshops and strategies to support decision making and future-state planning
- Create actionable processes, templates, materials, and Written Direction resources to ensure designs are practical and accessible
- Prepare comprehensive formal submissions and stakeholder engagement packs and worked on costing of structures.
Learning Experience Designer (Permanent role)
AIM - Australian Institute of Management (Scentia)
07.2018 - 04.2019
- Researched, proposed, and wrote new, short courses for the institute
- Met exacting standards of Australian Qualifications Framework (AWF)
- Designed and wrote participant and facilitator workbooks and presentation packs
- Established qualification criteria and exams for eight course packs, including innovative engagement tools and gamification to increase uptake.
Procedure and Manual Writer
TAFE NSW – Enterprise Process Excellence
12.2017 - 11.2018
- Established parameters, templates, and standards for a team of three technical writers to ensure harmony in the procedures that met the Written Direction standards.
- Wrote fifty-two high quality, accurate, sensible, and easy-to-follow procedures.
- Wrote three operational manuals and other special reports and documents.
Divisional Management System
Transport for NSW - Infrastructure & Services Division - Content Author
05.2017 - 10.2017
- Established editorial style guide, glossaries, templates within ISO 14001 standards.
- Researched, wrote and/ or edited six policy documents, seven frameworks and eight organization standards to support infrastructure and services projects (topics included governance, WHS, forecasting, infrastructure, community engagement, etc.)
- Created initial change promotion, on-line training and internal promotional materials for using the new Confluence knowledge management system.
Dubai' The Model Centre’ - Auditor – Assessor
Hamdan Bin Mohammed Award for Smart Government
10.2016 - 10.2016
- Completed annual, two-week audit of 400 quality standard metrics within a multi-dimensional scorecard of customer support and services centres.
- Wrote comprehensive reports regarding 27 of 34 government entities.
- Conducted in-depth team and individual interviews at designated centres.
- Calibrated results with a team of six other international auditors.
Project Manager - Process Review/ IT Incident Management Improvements
Australian Federal Government - Fair Work Ombudsman
11.2016 - 02.2016
- Reviewed/ analysed existing processes/ documentation, costs, capabilities and budget
- Identified and interviewed key stakeholders, shared service provider and in-house capabilities.
- Created a decision matrix tool to identify and define primary ‘problem’
- Wrote strategy paper for internal socialisation and board presentation to pinpoint quality and cost improvements.
Program Manager/ Bus Process Improvements
Parramatta City Council
02.2015 - 08.2015
- Led organization-wide review of processes/ procedures affecting customer service results:
- Recommended and documented improvements and identified enterprise-wide dependencies, socialised solutions with stakeholders, including wider use of TRIM
- Created work-flow processes documenting ‘as is’ to identify weaknesses and documented recommendations for ‘to be’ processes
- Scoped agreed improvements to meet agreed budget and achieve/ exceed business case benefits and eliminate duplication of effort and trained employees to take ownership of a continuous improvement process.
Associate Director – IT Incident Management Process Review
Macquarie Group – Incident Management
12.2013 - 10.2014
- Reduced meantime to restore IT infrastructure from disruptive incidents by up to 70%.
- Led two tech writers to collaborate on project terminology, templates, processes to schedule and document solutions to the 100 most critical IT incidents.
- Reviewed previous approaches, interviewed (individually and in workshops), representative SMEs responsible for various IT infrastructure within the organisation.
- Created, socialised concepts to finalised workflow processes in Visio diagrams.
- Created UAT and realistic simulations to practice and/ or refine processes, measure timeliness of steps and pinpoint areas to be strengthened.
- Set up a gamified program for engagement and sign-off of incident models by IT and business executives.
- Set up an easy-to-access and use archive of documents in Confluence and left behind comprehensive instruction guides to manage the program into the future.
Education
Bachelor of Education - Education
Ohio State University
Columbus, OhioAA - Commercial Art
Famous Artist School
Westport, CTPhysician’s Assistant Certification - undefined
Bryman College of Medicine
Atlanta, GASkills
- Advanced user of Microsoft applications (including Visio, Teams, and SharePoint), Atlassian Confluence and JIRA, ArcMap, Content Manager (TRIM), Adobe Creative Suite, Promapp, Information Mapping, ServiceNow, PowerBI, Doodley
- ITIL-3, BABOK, PMBOK, Agile and Prosci Creative Problem Solving (CPSI), Six Thinking Hats (de Bono), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Theory of Constraints (Goldratt), Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics, Rudolph Flesch Readability
- Peer review coordination
- Technical editing
- Information architecture design
- Content strategy development
- Continuous improvement mindset
- Agile methodology
- User experience focus
- Visual communication techniques
Certification
- ‘PowerBI Basics’ and ‘From Excel to PowerBI’ – Knowledge Accelerators
- ‘Artificial Intelligence Data Fairness & Bias’ – Learn Quest
- ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence’ – IBM
- Georgia Tech – ‘User Experience Design’
- UC San Diego – ‘Learning How to Learn’
- Vanderbilt University – ‘Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative’
- University of California, Irving – ‘Foundations of Virtual Instruction’
- Stanford University – ‘Organisational Analysis’
- Adizes Institute – ‘PAEI Mastering Change Program’
- Avraham Y. Goldratt Institute – ‘Theory of Constraints - Project Management’
- Prosci Change Management – ‘Pilot Pro 2010’
- CSPI Buffalo NY - Accredited Creative Problem Solver
- State University of New York at Buffalo NY - Archetype Research Studies
Timeline
Senior technical writer
TAFE NSW
01.2025 - Current
Senior Learning Experience Designer/ BA
Customer Science
05.2024 - 01.2025
Senior BA/ Tech Writer
UTS - Philanthropic Program
07.2023 - 12.2023
BA/ Technical Writer
Macquarie Group – Data Transformation
05.2023 - 07.2023
Lead Tech Writer
Tech Mahindra – Digital Transformation Project
01.2023 - 06.2023
Senior Business Process Analyst
WaterNSW – Transformation/ Process Engineering/ Flood Operations
09.2021 - 11.2022
BA/ Senior Technical Writer
Commonwealth Bank of Australia - ServiceNow Transition
03.2021 - 05.2021
BA/ Tech Writer
WaterNSW—Assessments & Approvals
03.2020 - 03.2021
Technical Writer/ Organisation Design/ Change Analyst
TAFE NSW – SRMS Project - Enterprise Performance & Excellence
03.2019 - 11.2019
Learning Experience Designer (Permanent role)
AIM - Australian Institute of Management (Scentia)
07.2018 - 04.2019
Procedure and Manual Writer
TAFE NSW – Enterprise Process Excellence
12.2017 - 11.2018
Divisional Management System
Transport for NSW - Infrastructure & Services Division - Content Author
05.2017 - 10.2017
Project Manager - Process Review/ IT Incident Management Improvements
Australian Federal Government - Fair Work Ombudsman
11.2016 - 02.2016
Dubai' The Model Centre’ - Auditor – Assessor
Hamdan Bin Mohammed Award for Smart Government
10.2016 - 10.2016
Program Manager/ Bus Process Improvements
Parramatta City Council
02.2015 - 08.2015
Associate Director – IT Incident Management Process Review
Macquarie Group – Incident Management
12.2013 - 10.2014
AA - Commercial Art
Famous Artist School
Physician’s Assistant Certification - undefined
Bryman College of Medicine
Bachelor of Education - Education
Ohio State University
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