Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners

Manufacturing, distribution, marketing, sales, customer contact – all of that is supremely manageable by a very small team. In the traditional model, you have this big corporation where the creative department is in the back, and they’re those wacky people with the Tabasco ties and chattering teeth in their cubicle, and everybody is a little afraid of them because they’re so “wild.” The rest of the company is the marketing, production, distribution, all of that. Well, our idea was that the little creative team could do everything.

Coudal, Jim. Design Glut (2009). Articles>Interviews>Graphic Design>Collaboration

Police Reform, Task Force Rhetoric, and Traces of Dissent: Rethinking Consensus-as-Outcome in Collaborative Writing Situations    

Pedagogical and scholarly representations of collaborative writing and knowledge construction in technical communication have traditionally recognized consensus as the logical outcome of collaborative work, even as scholars and teachers have acknowledged the value of conflict and "dissensus" in the process of collaborative knowledge building. However, the conflict-laden work product of a Denver task force charged with recommending changes to the city police department's use-of-force policy and proposing a process for police oversight retains the collaborative group's dissensus and in doing so, illustrates an alternative method of collaborative reporting that challenges convention. Such an approach demonstrates a dissensus-based method of reporting that has the potential to open new rhetorical spaces for collaborative stakeholders by gainfully extending collaborative conversations and creating new opportunities for ethos development, thus offering scholars, teachers, and practitioners a way of reimagining the trajectory and outcome of collaborative work.

Knievel, Michael. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2008). Articles>Collaboration>Policies and Procedures>Government

Stasis Theory as a Strategy for Workplace Teaming and Decision Making    

Current scholarship tells us that skills in teaming are essential for students and practitioners of professional communication. Writers must be able to cooperate with subject-matter experts and team members to make effective decisions and complete projects. Scholarship also suggests that rapid changes in technology and changes in teaming processes challenge workplace communication and cooperation. Professional writers must be able to use complex software for projects that are often completed by multidisciplinary teams working remotely. Moreover, as technical writers shift from content developers to project managers, our responsibilities now include useradvocacy and supervision, further invigorating the need for successful communication. This article offers a different vision of an ancient heuristic—stasis theory—as a solution for the teaming challenges facing today's professional writers. Stasis theory, used as a generative heuristic rather than an eristic weapon, can help foster teaming and effective decision making in contemporary pedagogical and workplace contexts.

Brizee, H. Allen. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2008). Articles>Education>Project Management>Collaboration

Let Us Now Praise Editors

Editors are craftsmen, ghosts, psychiatrists, bullies, sparring partners, experts, enablers, ignoramuses, translators, writers, goalies, friends, foremen, wimps, ditch diggers, mind readers, coaches, bomb throwers, muses and spittoons -- sometimes all while working on the same piece.

Kamiya, Gary. Salon (2007). Articles>Editing>Collaboration

Why Is It That Teams Do A Poor Job of Post-Writing-Project Analysis?

Project teams may recognize that reviews are not working well, though the may not understand why. A valuable solution is to conduct ”lessons learned” analysis following the end of the project. Too often, though, post-writing-project analysis receives little commitment or meaningful effort, but why?

Cuppan, Gregory P. Brainery.net (2009). Articles>Documentation>Collaboration>Assessment

All Advice on How to Manage Creative People is Awful

A good manager is someone who makes everyone feel like he or she is creative in their work. Because creative work is the most fulfilling work, and we are each capable of that kind of work.

Trunk, Penelope. Brazen Careerist (2009). Articles>Management>Collaboration

Obfuscating the Obvious: Miscommunication Issues in the Interpretation of Common Terms    

We communicate via many forms every day. When what we say or write is misunderstood, the fault may lie with either party. One source of miscommunication is the different meaning people place on commonly used words and phrases. In this article, the authors report preliminary results from a study on such miscommunication and lay out an agenda for research on improving business communication based on the Integrative Model of Levels of Analysis of 'Miscommunication,' developed by Coupland, Wiemann, and Giles.

Brewer, Edward C. and Terrence L. Holmes. JBC (2009). Articles>Business Communication>Collaboration>Rhetoric

Corporate Collaborative Authoring

The idea of a Book Sprint is that you can get lots of documentation written in a focused amount of time with the right team and some amount of content already in place. Gathering people in the same room when possible is extremely helpful and motivating as well.

Gentle, Anne. Just Write Click (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Agile>Documentation

The Importance of Building a SharePoint Team

A successful team is perhaps won of the most critical aspects to a successful SharePoint project, because without the right people you can’t make it happen. The first thing to say is that building a successful team is not about hiring as many developers as possible and hope they get it all to work. In fact the place to start is not with the people who will implement the project but those who will envisage and plan the project.

Baddeley, Peter. End User SharePoint (2009). Articles>Content Management>Collaboration>Microsoft SharePoint

There's Nothing Rapid About Rapid eLearning

Rapid eLearning has seen a 7 or 8 year maturation that sometimes amuses me quite a bit. Why? Because many of the young developers have probably never had the experience of working within a large multimedia development team consisting of designers, storyboard teams, Flash developers, and creative artists. They are reduced to storyboarding in PowerPoint or Post-its, developing in Captivate or Articulate, and using iStockPhoto to fill in for their illustrative work.

Lloyd, John. Velocity Made Good (2009). Articles>Web Design>Collaboration

Death by Twitter

I'm starting to wonder how many other people feel like they are being Twittered to death? Not just from the hundreds of tools out there to Tweet, search Tweets, or receive them, rather just the constant overload of articles, how-to's, and incorporation of Twitter into just about every topic across the board.

Lloyd, John. Velocity Made Good (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Social Networking

Designing Collaborative Learning Spaces: Where Material Culture Meets Mobile Writing Processes  

In May 2007, the Department of English at Utah State University (USU) redesigned its computer lab to increase mobility and collaboration during writing projects. Our study shows that despite the Professional and Technical Communication (PTC) field's efforts to promote writing as a socially active, collaborative practice, many students view computer labs as spaces for conducting isolated, single-authored work. In this article, we discuss how a combination of movable furniture and mobile technology, including wireless access and laptops, can enhance student collaboration in group-based writing assignments. The lab included both desktop and laptop seating areas, so the authors created a modified worksite analysis designed to evaluate team collaboration in this new layout. These material changes in the lab allow students to configure the space according to their needs, offering them some measure of control over three crucial elements of successful collaboration: formality, presence, and confidentiality.

Bemer, Amanda Metz, Ryan M. Moeller and Cheryl E. Ball. Programmatic Perspectives (2009). Articles>Education>Collaboration>Workplace

Mutual Mentoring: An Editorial Philosophy for a New Scholarly Journal  

Aside from Writing Program Administration, the WPA journal, very little scholarly work about—or interest in—the topic of academic program administration has been manifested in the rhetoric-related disciplines. We believe that a mutual mentoring approach is an effective way to develop our community’s sense of the importance of program administration work as a scholarly endeavor in its own right.

Kitalong, Karla Saari. Programmatic Perspectives (2009). Articles>Education>Mentoring>Collaboration

Discovering Magic

Wouldn’t it be a little magical if, when you signed up for a new site, it said something like, “We notice you have a profile photo on Flickr and Twitter, would you like to use one of those or upload a new one?” Glenn Jones created a JavaScript library called Ident Engine that can help you do just that.

Jones, Glenn. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Social Networking>Collaboration

The Impact of Agile on User-Centered Design    

Discusses the impact of an agile software development process on usability testing. Reports opinions about usability testing within a company before and after a change to agile. Presents strategies to incorporate usability testing into agile product development.

Dayton, David and Carol S. Barnum. Technical Communication Online (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Collaboration>Agile

Experience Themes

When a screenwriter can summarize a story in one sentence, he has a compass that can guide him throughout the writing process. Cindy Chastain chronicles how we can translate this approach to help us remember the quality and value of the experience we intend to deliver.

Chastain, Cindy. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Collaboration

How To Effectively Communicate With Developers

If you have ever worked with a developer or a development team, this article will probably strike close to home. As designers, we work with dozens of developers across the globe each year. Some of us are fortunate enough to find a gem; a developer that just gets it. A developer that you feel is on your same wavelength in terms of what needs to be accomplished with the user interface, and what it needs to happen. Most often, however, we find developers that we generally don’t see eye to eye with.

Scherf, Ryan. Smashing (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Programming>SMEs

An Embarrassing Little Secret

Here’s a common assumption I’ve heard: People who network are ultra-confident, slick businessy types who are in their element approaching complete strangers and doing business deals on the spot. Rubbish! There might be a bit of this going on, but there are always lots of nervous, uncomfortable people who are giving it a go too. And networking isn’t about quick wins – instant business deals or job offers – it’s a slower process, of building up a network (hence the name) of mutual benefit. Eventually this can turn into business deals or job offers – that’s the point of doing it – but very rarely right away.

Potts, Rachel. Communication Cloud (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Community Building

Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter  

The microblogging service Twitter is in the process of being appropriated for conversational interaction and is starting to be used for collaboration, as well. In order to determine how well Twitter supports user-to- user exchanges, what people are using Twitter for, and what usage or design modifications would make it (more) usable as a tool for collaboration, this study analyzes a corpus of naturally-occurring public Twit- ter messages (tweets), focusing on the functions and uses of the @ sign and the coherence of exchanges. The findings reveal a surprising degree of conversa- tionality, facilitated especially by the use of @ as a marker of addressivity, and shed light on the limita- tions of Twitter's current design for collaborative use.

Honeycutt, Courtenay and Susan C. Herring. Semantic WebProceedings of the Forty-Second Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Social Networking>Ethnographies

Twitter and Conversation Analysis: Who's Here?

I believe that phone conversations for customer support have been studied quite a bit -- looking for phrases that sound like triggers for anger, avoiding long pauses, and when one party overtakes a phone conversation, it's relatively easy to detect when that's happening. But with Twitter, you could have long pauses intentionally as asynchronous, IM-like conversations happen when someone gets up from their desk and returns after a business meeting, for example. Neither party is angry about that long pause, it's just an understood agreement in the Twitter medium that you may or may not be immediately responsive. How does that time factor change the 'agreement' for a support exchange?

Gentle, Anne. Just Write Click (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Social Networking>Help

Authoring in an Agile Environment

It's a simple fact of life. Developing products in today's world requires shorter cycles, sensitivity to customer needs, and a focus on deliverables that breaks the old waterfall development paradigm. More and more there is a need for teams to focus on the entire development process and deliver precisely what customers need with little or no fluff. As products move towards the user-centric model of product development the push is for more intuitive interfaces with little need for documentation -- or does it really?

Vazquez, Julio J. SDI Global Solutions (2009). Articles>Documentation>Collaboration>Agile

Why People Twitter - In One Word

The other day I sat down to write something about Twitter. I struggled with my thoughts, threw some words down, and came up with a question: 'Why are you twittering?' The responses were significant. The most popular reasons I received: People and Information.

Harres, Victoria. Social Media Today (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Social Networking

Analysis of Team Design Review

Every other team meeting, three team members get 30 minutes each to talk about projects they are working on, and they get to demonstrate some of the cool things they are integrating into the project. As a team, we look at the project and both learn from what they’ve done, and make suggestions on how they might improve the project.

Pehrson, Paul. Technically Speaking (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Graphic Design>Assessment

How To Persuade Your Users, Boss or Clients

Whether you are getting a client to sign off on a website’s design or persuade a user to complete a call to action, we all need to know how to be convincing. Like many in the Web design industry, I have a strange job. I am part salesperson, part consultant and part user experience designer. One day I could be pitching a new idea to a board of directors, the next I might be designing an e-commerce purchasing process. There is, however, a common theme: I spend most of my time persuading people.

Boag, Paul. Smashing (2009). Articles>Business Communication>Collaboration>Rhetoric

The Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging: Sin 7, Being Inattentive

One appealing aspect of blogs over print media is the ability to comment and respond to comments. It’s the appeal of a conversation instead a lecture.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2009). Articles>Web Design>Blogging>Collaboration