Process of Knowledge Building in Educational Departments

In an educational department members are both drowning in information and craving knowledge. The department's information base is either scattered or unclassified. The business world understood this scenario and has brought a change to their knowledge infrastructure by including knowledge management (KM) systems. Educational departments, too, need to rethink their knowledge organization strategies. Therefore, a conversion from information to knowledge becomes imperative.

Rao, Abhijit. ASIST (2002). Articles>Knowledge Management>Collaboration

Process Pieces and Tools in Content Development

As long as we are working with people, there will be clogs in the flow of information. As long as we are working for corporations, the bottom line will be money. With the dependence on computers and information in accessible and digital form, there is still a challenge in getting meaningful information. The tools, as advanced and automated as they are, will not fix all our problems. But we have to work with what we have, and automate as much of the production and maintenance of our content as possible.

Albing, Bill. KeyContent.org (2006). Articles>Content Management

Project Management for Creative Teams: Art and Science

The definition of a Project Manager varies widely, especially in the creative fields. Like the approaches and outcomes of a creative project, the team member’s project roles —including the project manager’s — change from one project to the next and from one firm to another. The purpose of this essay is to explore the practice of project management specifically in regards to working with creative teams and their specific needs and challenges.

Adaptive Path (2008). Articles>Project Management

Project Management for the Technical Communicator

Tasks need to be managed to be completed on time, with available resources to achieve the required result.

Bhatt, Sita Chandrakant. Indus (2005). Articles>Project Management>TC

Project Management for Writers  

Project management skills are part of every writer's life, in some form or another. However, the more you use these skills to manage your daily work, the more you will grow as a writer. Estimating, controlling scope, and tracking your progress are all part of delivering the product that your "customer" wants. Your primary tool is your documentation plan. In this workshop, we will discuss why these processes are important to you and how to implement them on your job.

Yeo, Sarah C. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Project Management>Writing

Project Management in a Home-Based Environment  

Acxiom Corporation provides a wide spectrum of data products, data integration services, and mailing list services, as well as data warehousing and decision support services to major firms in the United States and United Kingdom. Effectively supporting the company¡¯s documentation needs requires a project process that keeps work flowing. The Documentation team developed a process consisting of four phases: planning, design, validation, and delivery. This triedand- true process contributes to the success of our home-based team.

McKee, Kimberly and Deborah Lovell. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Project Management>TC

A Project Manager's Survival Guide to Going Agile  

When software development project teams move to Agile methodologies, they often leave project managers behind. Traditionally trained project managers are confused as to what their new roles and responsibilities should be in an environment that no longer needs them to make stand-alone decisions. This paper focuses on re-defining the job of project manager to better fit the self-managed team environment, one of the core Agile principles. Special emphasis is placed on the shift to servant leadership, with its focus on facilitation and collaboration. Mapping of PMBOK knowledge areas to Agile practices is discussed at length. After reading this paper, project managers should have a better understanding of what changes they need to make professionally, and how to make these changes in order to survive the transition to an Agile software development approach.

Sliger, Michele. Rally Software Development (2007). Articles>Project Management>Agile

Proposal Production: Creating Calm Amid the Chaos  

The production of a winning business proposal can be a tough and trying time for all involved. But with the use of some simple tools, strategic up-front planning, and effective management techniques during actual production, the proposal task can run smoother and more eflciently. And by following these guidelines you can lead a highly efficient proposal stafs through the toughest proposal efforts and produce a proposal document that wins new business and moves your company forward.

Wilson, Richard P. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Grants>Proposals>Project Management

Publications Project Management A Toolkit for Overcoming Common Pitfalls  

Traditional project management 'science' and generic tools rarely match the unique needs of publications projects. The high-degree of human interaction and creativity involved in publication projects makes managing them more and than a science. This discussion/demonstration focuses on the unique challenges involved in managing publications projects and common pitfalls to avoid. We explain why we at Comprose, Inc. created the Documentation Blueprint Project Management Toolkit for managing publications projects, and we demonstrate how technical communicators can use these Custom-designed tools to make any publication project run more smoothly -- whether your project involves just one person or twenty.

Anton, Kathy, Teresa J. Tarwater and Andrea Heugatter. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Project Management>Publishing

Publishing a Project Weblog

Running a project Weblog is a great way to collect, organize, and publish the documents and discussions that are the lifeblood of the project and to shape these raw materials into a coherent narrative. The serial nature of the Weblog helps you make it the project's newspaper of record. This kind of storytelling can become a powerful way to focus the attention of a group. The desire to listen to a compelling story and find out what happens next is a deep human instinct.

Udell, Jon. InfoWorld (2003). Articles>Project Management>Community Building>Blogging

Publishing for Dual Media — Paper and Electronic  

With electronic publications moving solidly into the mainstream, it is becoming apparent that steps must be taken to streamline the production process. Compared to the relative simplicity of traditional hard copy output, the electronic medium introduces new capabilities — and complexity — for publishers. Indeed, electronic publishing is not much different than programming; publishers must address issues like user interfaces, hypertext linking and context-sensitive intelligence.

New, Michael. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Quality Documentation: ISO 9000 as a Process Model  

While ‘quality’ is no longer the most popular buzz-word, there is still a need for thorough understanding of what it means to document a quality program. In preparing for ISO 9000 certification, I developed useful techniques which can be used to improve quality in other documentation tasks. Even if you're not involved in ISO 9000, it can serve as a good general model for documentation management. This paper briefly describes the ISO 9000 standard and the process of certification, how documentation in a quality program is different than usual technical documentation. and some of the useful tools and techniques.

Magyar, Miki D. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Management>Policies and Procedures>Technical Writing

Quality Management in Software Development Projects

How do you ensure that business software systems will be good quality, i.e. they will meet the business need and have few bugs? How might 'testing' be perforned at the requiremenst and design stages?

Roberts, Mike Harding. HRA Consulting (2004). Articles>Project Management>Quality

Quality Time Well Spent  

ISO 9000 are quality assurance standards that allow companies to do business in Europe and ensure customers that quality processes are in place. As writers, we are very involved in quality standards-both in assisting our companies in recording their quality policies, procedures and instructions and in making sure our own departments follow quality procedures. We can do this through needs analyses, documentation plans, documentation design standards, status reports, usability reviews, editing by someone other than the writer, and usability testing.

Yeo, Sarah C. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Management>Standards>ISO 9000

Quality Time: How Good Documentation Cuts Development Costs  

Discusses several ways project managers can control the sometimes-chaotic process of documentation development.

Woodcock, Gill. Intercom (2001). Articles>Management>Documentation

Real Costs Of Technical Publications  

This workshop shows a technical publication manager or rising professional how to work in the following technical publishing/financial areas: project management, operating budget preparation and management, and quality control.

Caernarven-Smith, Patricia. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Publishing>Technical Writing>Project Management

The Real Costs of Technical Publications  

This workshop shows you how to balance the relationships among time, money, and output. Time is defined as your time and the machines’ time. Money is what this all costs. Therefore, your manuals, screens, and moving media cost money - money we can account for. In this workshop, we will tackle some timehonored questions.

Caernarven-Smith, Patricia. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Project Management

Recursively Sorting our Documents

Traditional document management vendors and many newer approaches allow you to apply multiple attributes to individual documents, such that they can retrieved according to different facets.

Byrne, Tony. CMSworks (2004). Articles>Content Management>Search

Redefining Content Management

We live in a time where people have an amazing amount of power when it comes to publishing. Blogging, podcasts, vidcasts (or whatever you call ‘em) and more have been put into the hands of millions and it’s changing the way we live and work. Despite all of that, content management for the web remains a huge pain point for many individuals and businesses. The amount of time, effort and money that’s involved (and often wasted) to do things that are seemingly rather straightforward is astronomical.

Robinson, D. Keith. Vitamin (2008). Articles>Content Management

Relative Costs of Paper and Online Documentation

This article compares the costs of development, production and maintenance for paper and online documentation.

Unwalla, Mike. TechScribe (2003). Articles>Documentation>Management

Requirements of Content Management Systems: Definition According to Need

In all companies, the requirements of an editorial system are worked out individually from the analysis of existing functioning and the definition of editorial and publication processes required in the future. The first important criteria for analysis are change frequencies and degree of reuse of the published information. The description of the information types as well as translation sequences constitute another starting point for the definition of a modular work process (single-source principle) and publication options (cross-media publishing).

Ziegler, Wolfgang. tekom (2005). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Workflow

Requirements: A Primer for Communicators  

Poorly written requirements are the single biggest point of failure in the development of new software systems. Requirements that are not carefully defined or are written in ambiguous terms result in an endless stream of re- working and budget overruns. Smart project managers these days are trying to solve the problem with the addition of professional communicators to their project teams to both elicit crisp requirements and express them in simple, accessible terms.

Shelton, Jan D. and Karen A. Steele. STC Proceedings (2005). Articles>Project Management>Proposals

Resistance, Gender, and Bourdieu's Notion of Field

Recent conceptualizations of resistance have tended to privilege intentional and conscious acts of resistance and forms of resistance manifested within relations of power that researchers typically define as asymmetrical, such as the labor-management relation. The author argues that these tendencies lead us to overlook forms of resistance manifest in other relations of power that exist in organizations, as well as set ourselves up as arbitrators of what is to be considered 'effective' resistance. Using Bourdieu's concepts of capital and field, the author examines how we can read resistance both to the idea of sex discrimination and to patriarchal power relations from the accounts of female career police officers and offers a more perspectival, relativistic account of resistance.

Penny, Dick. Management Communication Quarterly (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Management>Theory

Resistance: Would Struggle by Any Other Name Be as Sweet?    

Management in professionalized workplaces is often characterized as Mtrying to herd cats. Having grown up on a dairy farm, the characterization never made much sense to me. Cows and sheep earn our disparaging remarks because they are easy to push around. Their occasional resistance seems counter to their character. But cats are also easy to herd; just have milk. Cats may walk by themselves, but they quickly all choose to walk in the same direction following the pail. Cats may quickly resist getting pushed in common directions, but they are easily pulled there. Got milk, got cats. Are cats more autonomous than the herds? Has resisting cats led us to overlook how easy they are to herd? Resistance comes to us as a term growing out of workplaces that tried to push and direct. Resistance was at least a pushing back; sometimes it was an organized pushing for another direction.

Deetz, Stanley. Management Communication Quarterly (2008). Articles>Management>Workplace>Cultural Theory