Client-Friendly Atmosphere: The Polish and The Lubricants

During the last few years in projects, I interacted with a lot of clients. All these projects were based offshore, where client interaction was mainly through emails or teleconferences. When you do not work face-to-face with clients, communication is key to win your clients' confidence.

Nafde, Yamini. Indus (2006). Careers>Consulting>Collaboration

Client-Vendor Communications: What to Talk About to Get the Job Done  

This progression presents a structured approach to client-vendor communications that can enhance quality; ease frazzled nerves; and result in win-win situations for clients, vendors, end users, and their organizations. Participants will discuss how clear, structured communications can strengthen their roles as clients and vendors of publication products and services. Participants will review the checklist that this vendor developed for use from initial contact to contract to project completion. Discussion will address how participants can develop their own customized checklists.

Shenouda, Judith E. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Business Communication>Collaboration

Cliffnotes To Keep You From Cliffhanging  

Understanding organizational behavior and using creative problem solving are as much a part of being a technical communicator as is expertly applying the English language. Recognizing this, the authors-two senior technical communicators—have identified several typical, but not predictable, organizational problems that involve technical communicators. Solutions will be provided when the paper is presented at the conference.

Modrey, Laurie and Emily A, Sopensky. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Collaboration>Planning

Collaborating in Project Management, Long-Distance  

From early 1993 through July of 1994, three STC chapters jointly managed a research project on Technical Communication in Western Canada. Based in Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver, the managers were thousands of miles apart, relative strangers and simultaneously engaged in running their own businesses. In this volunteer assignment, they involved committees within their own chapters. As team building and collaborative arrangements become more prevalent in technical communications projects, it can be instructive to look at how such a farflung research project fared. We will relate this experience briefly to some research results reported in Technical Communication.

Jones, Sheila C. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Project Management>TC>Collaboration

Collaboration Glossary

The following glossary defines terms used in the context of collaboration.

SAP Design Guild (2004). Resources>Collaboration

Collaboration Sessions: How to Lead Multidisciplinary Teams, Generate Buy-In, and Create Unified Design Views in Compressed Timeframes

I have participated in, led, and suffered major website redesign efforts. Whether at process-heavy consultancies, notable product companies, or design studios, all teams experience the same points of pain: late feedback, lack of common design vision, and complaints that individuals or teams didn’t have enough input.

Verhage, Sasha. Boxes and Arrows (2005). Articles>Collaboration>Usability>User Centered Design

Collaboration Via Desktop Videoconferencing: Evaluating Mentoring Environments  

Based on the need for mentoring, we developed a multimedia configuration that fostered one-on-one connections. In this study, we examine these connections in terms of what strategies mentors use when mentoring and how mentors respond to students. The two case studies indicate that neither of the subjects took full advantage of the multimedia system or the environments in which it functioned: neither mentor chose to manage the computer screen so that they could adequately see their student or chose to monitor the environments in a manner beneficial to their students. However, mentors tended to differentiate between weak and strong writers in this environment.

Duin, Ann Hill, Linda A. Jorn and Lisa Mason. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Collaboration>Mentoring>Videoconferencing

Collaboration Via Desktop Videoconferencing: Implications for Technical Communication  

From our case studies of technical communication college students collaborating via desktop videoconferencing (DTV) with high school students, we learned that DTV requires that collaborators manage a great deal more than text on a computer screen. Collaborators reliant on viewing computers as conveyors of text alone must learn new strategies for connecting interpersonally with people viewed on screen. Collaborators must macro-manage technology while they micro-manage dialogue about writing.

Duin, Ann Hill, Linda A. Jorn and Lisa Mason. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Collaboration>TC>Online

Collaboration via E-mail and Internet Relay Chat: Understanding Time and Technology    

The purpose of this preliminary study was to structure and begin to study how collaborators working across distance perceive and use e-mail and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to facilitate their collaborative and decision-making processes. Students from the University of Western Sydney and the University of Minnesota worked in pairs to respond to four decision-making scenarios over a four-week period. Using e-mail, students came to a decision more quickly than when using IRC, and when IRC was slow, students reverted to a series of rapid-fire e-mail messages to facilitate their work. Students appreciated the cross-cultural experience; however, they struggled to create a shared communicative context via the Internet.

Duin, Ann Hill and Ray Archee. Technical Communication Online (1996). Articles>Collaboration>Email

The Collaborative Construction of a Management Report in a Municipal Community of Practice: Text and Context, Genre and Learning    

Drawing on rhetorical genre studies and recent work in activity system theory, this study focuses on the collaborative development of a new written form, a municipal plan for protecting and managing natural areas. The author advances a twofold claim: (a) that the written plan is developed in the absence of a stable textual model and (b) that the text, as part of the context, functions, in turn, as a mediational tool for solving the rhetorical problem of audience resistance. Findings show that as participants reconfigure the project into successive cycles of activity, they create corresponding zones of proximal development. This study contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of the text-context relationship and to recent elaborations of genre as an activity system that help explain the relationship between genre and learning.

Wegner, Diana. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2004). Articles>Collaboration>Environmental>Government

Collaborative Design Thinking  

The purpose of this presentation today is to introduce a collaborative design model, to describe the kinds of knowledge resources that can be found in each part of the model, and to introduce a few principles of design thinking that I believe can help us to effectively recognize, create and use knowledge resources in our design activities.

Robertson, Bob. University of Alberta (2003). Design>Collaboration

Collaborative Document Editing with svk

Say you have a document that needs to be presented in two languages and you are the translator. While the translation is in progress, someone revises the original master document. This means you now might be working with an outdated paragraph or one no longer present in the master version. This article tries to map this problem to parallel development, which version control systems solve with the branch and merge model. You will also see how svk helps you maintain translated documents easily.

Kao, Chia-liang. O'Reilly and Associates (2004). Articles>Content Management>Collaboration>Writing

Collaborative Invention Among Experts in an Interdisciplinary Context: The Creation of Written Discourse for Countermeasures to Biological and Chemical Threats    

Programs in technical and scientific communication educate students from multiple disciplines. As we teach these students from various fields, we often assume they will write to others who are members of the same field. However, professionals commonly communicate across disciplinary boundaries and collaborate with those who do not necessarily belong to their field. We should rethink our approaches in teaching scientific and technical communication to consider how different peoplefrom different areas of expertise engage one another in a communication situation. Based on the understanding that different disciplinary cultures and languages alter contexts for communication, astudy examining how experts from science, engineering, mathematics, and architecture come together as a single group and collaboratively invent discourse can contribute to new knowledge to inform curriculum development.

Gooch, John C. CPTSC Proceedings (2001). Articles>Risk Communication>Collaboration

Collaborative Projects in a Technical Writing Class: A Cost/Benefit Analysis    

With the shift in writing pedagogy from product to process, from emphasizing the individual writing--in a vacuum--to emphasizing the social context and social nature of writing, collaboration of some sort has found a place in most writing classes. The inclusion of collaborative projects in technical writing courses has a second, practical justification: the idea that these courses should prepare students for writing on the job, where collaborative writing is common.

Brumberger, Eva R. NCTE TETYC (1999). Articles>Education>Collaboration

Collaborative Virtual Workspace

CVW is a collaboration software environment that provides a 'virtual building' where teams can communicate, collaborate, and share information, regardless of their geographic location. CVW takes virtual meetings one step further and enables virtual co-location through persistent virtual rooms, each incorporating people, information, and tools appropriate to a task, operation, or service.

SourceForge (2001). Resources>Software>Collaboration>Open Source

Collaborative Writing In Segmentalist Organizations: Commitments For Team Success  

Many large, hierarchical organizations are segmentalist in their approach to management. Nonetheless, such organizations are capable of supporting integrated, team approaches to particular types of communication problems. For such approaches to be successful, however, there must be strong managerial commitments to team support. This paper discusses how committed leadership, specific production guidelines, and empowerment enhanced the activities of an Air Force writing team assembled to help revise and edit Air Force Policy Directives containing corporate level guidance on a variety of topics.

Rice, Rodney P. and James Waller. STC Proceedings (1994). Presentations>Management>Collaboration

Collaboratively Planning and Preparing a Memo  

A great deal of writing in the workplace is done collaboratively, and it’s important to get practice not only in writing, but in writing with others, which can be a very different process. In this exercise, you will write a memo collaboratively with another student, following the directions for assignment 1, text pages 153- 156, in Chapter 5 (“Collaboration in Workplace Communication”). You’ll also revise an information sheet.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Collaboration

Combining Interpersonal and Technical Communication Courses to Improve How Teams Function  

Research indicates that teams are more effective when they satisfy the social goals of their members. Therefore, teams that focus on interpersonal communication (the internal performance process) as well as the team's objective (the external product) improve their chances for success. It follows, then, that classroom instructors can enhance team success by adding interpersonal communication components to courses that use teams. This paper shows how we used this research to design an innovative NSF program. The program incorporated an interpersonal communication component to motivate student teams to succeed.

Barchilon, Marian G. and Donald G. Kelley. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Education>Collaboration

Comics: Not Just for Laughs!

Every project has its own unique set of 'opportunities'--also known as challenges. Many of these challenges relate not to the quality of our work, but rather to the communication of our ideas. Often in the course of design, you must communicate complicated concepts to a non-technical (and often uninterested) project sponsor, client, or stakeholder. So how do you capture their interest, get their understanding and buy-in, and finally move on?

Sedaca, Rebekah. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>Project Management>Collaboration>Technical Illustration

Communicating Effectively in Intercultural Virtual Teams

Organizations with virtual teams have invested vast resources in recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce, offering cultural diversity training and providing the technology that makes the functioning of these teams possible. To ignore the opportunities and the potential pitfalls of these teams would minimize this investment.

Oetzel, John and Martina H. Myers. Communication World Bulletin (2005). Articles>Collaboration>Online

Communicating Effectively with Your Web Developer

A rather stressful part of optimizing some sites can be working with a web developer who doesn't understand the importance of search engine friendly design. Sometimes these developers can be frustrating or keep you from getting your work done right. This article contains a number of thing to keep in mind and to avoid when working in these situations.

Sullivan Cassidy, Jennifer. SEOchat (2005). Articles>Web Design>Collaboration

Communicating with Clients

Technical language is important to professions like ours. It enables us to define precisely what we are talking about, so facilitating unambiguous communication within our profession, with other professions, and when appropriate, with consumers of our services.

Bowen, Caroline. Tripod.com (1998). Careers>Collaboration>Communication

Communication Channels Used by Technical Writers Throughout the Documentation Process    

This article focuses on communication channels used by technical writers to obtain and verify product information. Although much has been written about communication channel components (for example, document review), little discussion has focused on the spectrum of communication channels available to technical writers or why they might choose certain channels. The communication channels identified in this article include team meetings, document review, individual face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and e-mail. To test my identification and to see which channels writers would choose when presented with different scenarios, I collected and analyzed data from a survey of approximately 30 technical communicators who responded to an e-mail questionnaire sent to 170 STC members.

McGee, Lynn. Technical Communication Online (2000). Articles>Communication>Collaboration

Communication in Cross-Functional Teams: An Introduction to This Special Issue    

The importance of teams has grown during the past decades as increasing numbers of organizations have turned to collaborative models of work. The emphasis on 'cross-functional' reflects the growing complexity of today's work, where no single individual or job function possesses sufficient knowledge or skill for developing or maintaining innovative products and services. One of the biggest challenges of teams is developing patterns of effective communication. As with all processes and practices in the workplace, communication within cross-functional teams must be examined, discussed, and taught explicitly for such teams to succeed. The articles in this issue provide insights into the communication challenges facing individuals working in teams in today's workplace. In addition, the issue discusses a variety of tools and techniques for improving communication and efficiency within teams and the quality of work produced.

Smart, Karl L. and Carol M. Barnum, eds. Technical Communication Online (2000). Articles>Communication>Collaboration