My Role at Inteserra Consulting Group

As a small firm with less than 50 employees, Inteserra offered me the invaluable opportunity to wear many hats to solve complex communication issues for a variety of audiences. Inteserra Consulting Group was a regulatory compliance firm for small Telecom companies offering services such as business entry at relevant governmental agencies, regulatory report tracking and management, regulatory publications, and other ad-hoc project management. 

As an Associate Consultant, I helped 50+ small telecom companies establish themselves throughout all 50 states. I also served as the Marketing and Business Development Coordinator where I honed my Technical Communication skills. In this role, I orchestrated the print and digital content experience strategy for recurring seminar conferences for telecom providers hosted by Inteserra Consulting Group. 

Deliverables that I produced included:

• Print promotional materials
• Print and digital event program content
• Multimedia presentation templates
• Blogs
• Promotional videos
• Social media posts
• Souvenir media assets

For 50% of my time, I was the Assistant Project Manager to one of our leading clients with a special project, the first of its kind that the firm had undertaken. I was specifically recruited for this role, due to the variety of skills in my toolbox seasoned through my recently completed B.As in Writing and Rhetoric and Political Science, with a minor in Psychology. 

The client was awarded contracts from over 43 counties in Michigan to transform the technological infrastructure of their emergency services into the NG911 national initiative. NG911’s objective is to improve the 911 system to support text and multimedia messages, paired with the capability to interconnect with other systems and databases such as building plans and electronic medical records. 

My responsibilities included managing the communication between my client and their techs, the county officials, and the 100+ telecom companies that operated in each county to get them to establish physical network connections with my client and disconnect from the local incumbent 911 service provider.

The Challenge

Evidently, at Inteserra, I occupied the crossroad between Business Consulting, Marketing, Business Development, and the NG911 project. The firm was seeking similar opportunities with potential clients, and given my advanced writing skills, I was the perfect option to produce a case study of the firm’s handling of the NG911 project, to be used as a downloadable marketing asset and call-to-action on blogs to enlarge our email list. This portfolio features the published case study, “Innovative Solutions to Navigate Challenges in NG911 Implementation.”

The key challenge to this project was to present information that may be reaching an audience that is completely unfamiliar with the topic and to do it in a clear, concise, and compelling way, especially visually, as it would live as a downloadable marketing asset. Another consideration was the requirement to maintain client confidentiality and balance the depth of information that can be safely provided against the level of detail required to maximize the effectiveness of the case study. 

The Solution

Even though part of my audience might not be aware of the details of NG911, most people can easily understand that 911 should be able to find you when you call, at least as easily as Uber. Given the need for discretion in some dangerous situations, being able to text and send digital assets to 911 is easily seen as a greatly advantageous feature. 

But the overall goal of the case study was not just to inform the audience that NG911 is happening and that they can move towards it, it was also to provide a look into the challenges that come with implementing NG911 and how Inteserra Consulting Group is expertly managing them, even though the problems are complex, ambiguous, and dynamic. 

Research and Collaboration

Given my familiarity with the project that I was documenting for the case study, the research behind it was largely experiential. Beyond reading the available written material about the NG911 initiative, I interviewed Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) such as:

my Project Managers, the client’s Program Manager, the Consultant in charge of Business Development to understand which aspects of our services I should emphasize and gain a fuller grasp of the starting point of our potential audiences, and the Marketing Director to discuss what has worked (or not) as downloadable marketing assets on our blog. 

I also researched the case study genre and how to maximize its benefits for the specific purposes of this project. The writing effort was collaborative in terms of the background information and feedback/improvement cycles. 

Design

One major consideration for this case study was to be concise. Given the short attention span afforded to online reading, I wanted the document to be easily readable and skimmable. Effective and intuitive use of negative space, columns, subheadings, color, and icons helped me accomplish this goal.

To make the case study compelling and engaging, I decided to use design features to my advantage. I used Piktochart for the visual design. I always highly customize any template I use from similar services, such as Canva. My process is to familiarize myself with the library of visual elements and collect ideas across templates and from existing company marketing collaterals to maintain creative cohesion.

Writing

First, I defined the NG911 initiative opportunities and the challenges that await those who decide to undertake them. The underlying philosophy of the piece is that our team used our abilities to think on our feet married to our collective professional experiences to be a vanguard at confronting the defined challenges. And now, we have an understanding of what’s at stake, as demonstrated through specific examples, while maintaining client confidentiality. And we can support you, the audience of potential Telecom companies and 911 providers, in managing the multi-faceted NG911 implementation challenges.

The most information-dense section of the case study discussed “The Inteserra Solution”, where I specified why exactly those aspects of the project were challenging, such as how 

“The 911 system differed from county to county. Flexibility in meeting the requirements set forth by each governing body was crucial for the success of our client, especially in securing additional counties in the state.” 

Then, I detailed how Inteserra addressed the issue: 

“To honor the Client’s contractual obligations to the county, Inteserra obtained proprietary network diagrams from prospective vendors to ensure that geo-diversity existed between the primary and secondary paths.” 

I used technical language, with a primary audience in mind that is at least familiar with legacy 911 services. I wrapped up the case study by detailing the impact of the project, based on how successfully our methods worked. 

“With Inteserra’s dedication and expertise in managing multi-faceted technical projects, our client was able to meet all requirements imposed by this project.”

Final Thoughts

I like to see myself as an octopus, leaning into my variety of strengths, talents, and skills to help my users achieve their goals. This sample epitomizes the type of work that I’m currently seeking, where I can use my research, design, and writing skills to manage the content strategy and produce pieces for an organization. 

Especially in terms of design, my role at Inteserra taught me how to be creative with limited resources by truly learning the affordances of budget design software. Then, when I reached an enterprise environment like IBM Cloud, I transferred those skills so I could best utilize more robust design software such as Adobe Illustrator. 

With the variety of design and writing software available and the various conditions that guide organizations’ toolkit choices, it’s more important to know how to quickly onboard those types of programs to use them effectively than it is to specialize in one specific brand.

My philosophy as a Technical Communicator is centered around transferable skills; how to identify them, how to hone them, and how to modify them so they can be applicable within the constraints of any scenario.

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