How To Justify Conference Attendance

As a manager you may often be faced either with your own need to attend a professional conference or requests by your team members to attend one. Professional conferences can be expensive and not all budget managers understand their importance or the benefits derived by conference attendees. In this article, Mike Doyle discusses how to go about justifying the expense of attending a conference and provides some handy worksheets you can use to do so.

Doyle, Mike. Writing Assistance (2006). Articles>Management>Community Building>Assessment

How to Justify Hiring Technical Writers During Hard Economic Times

The marketplace for technical writers has often been challenging. In difficult economic times when companies seek to slash their budgets, it is often difficult for corporations to understand the need for a technical writer, let alone to understand the need to increase staffing in the documentation department. This article looks at the benefits of hiring technical writers, since their often diverse skill sets can be used across various departments in the organization.

Datta, Aparna. Writing Assistance (2007). Careers>Management>Writing>Technical Writing

How to Keep the Content Coming: Five Tips

Maintaining a steady flow of high-quality content can be a major challenge for any online venue. Shifting priorities, unexpected crises, ebbing resources, and just plain burnout can (and probably will) take its toll on your content plans. These tips can help you prevent or compensate for problems with your supply of fresh online content.

Gahran, Amy. Contentious (2002). Articles>Content Management>Writing

How to Manage Agile Development  

This whitepaper provides an Agile development overview full of techniques, best practices and educational materials.

Leffingwell, Dean. Rally Software Development (2005). Careers>Management>Agile

How to Manage Smart People

What follows is some advice for managers on how to manager people, especially talented people. I worked for nine years at Microsoft, sometimes managing projects, sometimes managing people, but always with a manager above me. I think I’m smart, but many of the people who have worked for me definitely were. Over the years I’ve experienced many mistakes and successes in both how I was managed, and how I managed others. There's no one way to manage people, but there are some approaches that I think most good managers share.

Berkun, Scott. ScottBerkun.com (2006). Careers>Management>Collaboration

How to Market a Documentation Department

When you first ventured into the tech writing ranks, marketing the department was likely the furthest thing from your mind. You already had work to do, so marketing was somebody else's job.

King, Robert. Writing Assistance (2006). Careers>Management>Technical Writing>Marketing

How to Plan Manpower on a Web Team

Just how many people does it take to properly manage a website? It depends on the website. Shane Diffily explains how to figure it out.

Diffily, Shane. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Web Design>Project Management>Collaboration

How to Plan On-line and Paper Versions of a Software Manual

On projects for which you must produce both on-line and paper documentation, there are many things you should consider before you start.

Kozuma, Bruce. Boston Broadside (1991). Articles>Documentation>Project Management>Planning

How to Present a Business Case for Web Site Investments

How can you convince others that Web investments are a wise decision in a slow economy?

Costello, Rick. STC Chicago (2003). Articles>Web Design>Project Management>Business Case

How to Revive a Zombie Content Management System

Without care and attention, a CMS can slide into a state of living death. Such systems can be revived by implementing a number of practical (and non-technical) activities.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2002). Articles>Content Management>Collaboration

How to Ruin a Writing Project in 10 Easy Steps

Does your job involve writing? Here's a surefire recipe for bringing on writer's block and making the whole process seem so onerous that you'll vow never to put pen to paper again.

Bennaco (2004). Articles>Project Management>Writing

How to Succeed As a First-Time UX Manager

In my last column, I suggested that being a manager of UX is no better—and no worse—than being a great designer or user researcher, but the roles are very different. In fact, as the book The First 90 Days [1] points out, the skills that make you successful as an individual contributor are not the same skills you need as a leader.

Nieters, Jim. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Management>Collaboration

How to Survive a Bad Manager

The best advice for having a bad manager is to seek other employment. Don’t undervalue your happiness: it’s impossible to be happy if you work directly for someone you can’t stand. It may be difficult to find another job, but if you are willing to make compromises in other areas (salary, position, project, location, etc.) it will certainly be possible. Being happy and underpaid is a much better way to spend a life than unhappy and anything else.

Berkun, Scott. ScottBerkun.com (2006). Careers>Workplace>Management

How to Write Information So You Can Use It Again

You have written a user’s manual for Microsoft Word for Windows. Now you have been asked to write a user’s manual for Microsoft Word for the Macintosh. The two word processors are essentially the same; the primary differences emerge from the differences between Windows and Macintosh systems. You feel that you should be able to prepare the second manual in next to no time, because you can essentially use the information you wrote for the Word for Windows manual again, with some technical changes. This is an example of re-using information and it is a common task among technical communicators. As the demand for information grows faster than the availability of people to develop that information, technical communicators are showing increasing interest in reusing information.

Carliner, Saul. Saul Carliner Studio (2003). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing

How XML Enables Information Sharing and Reuse — Interview with Joe Gollner

XML, a way of tagging and structuring your content, can help solve a number of problems, including storing, mining, reusing, and sharing content. XML helps enable the interoperability of information between systems, allowing you to export and import your content from one application to another. XML is behind much of the collaboration and information sharing Web 2.0 technologies, such as RSS (really simple syndication) and blogs. By storing content in XML, technical writers can ensure greater flexibility among technologies for authoring and publishing their content.

Gollner, Joe and Tom H. Johnson. Tech Writer Voices (2008). Articles>Interviews>Content Management>XML

Hurdles to Single-Sourcing

LaTeX and DocBook (and for that matter any manner of XML editors), which could be considered excellent single-sourcing tools, are almost never discussed.

Meyerding, Henry. KeyContent.org (2004). Articles>Content Management>LaTeX>DocBook

Hyperlinking Documents in PageMaker

These four supertips deal with adding links to your Adobe® PageMaker® 7.0 online documents: * Learn how to create anchors and simple page-to-page links. * Explore linking to external URLs using the Hyperlinks palette. * Drag links from Netscape Navigator directly onto elements on PageMaker document pages. * Create automatic tables of contents and index links for PageMaker documents that are exported to Adobe Acrobat® PDF files.

Adobe (2003). Design>Content Management>Document Design>Adobe PageMaker

I Need to Know What?  

Every technical communicator must develop a set of management skills appropriate to the task in order to excel as the leader of the communication team. This calls for multiple skills including being part diplomat, part technical expert, part salesman, and part turtle.

Bailey, Elizabeth. STC Proceedings (2005). Careers>TC>Project Management

I Wonder What This Button Does

We've all lost work to file overwrites and other minor disasters. There are remedies--and as Mike West explains, you don't have to have awe-inspiring technical skills to take advantage of them.

West, Mike. List Apart, A (2006). Articles>Project Management>Technology

Ideas to Invigorate a Chapter  

As a chapter leader, you work hard towards the goal of getting maximum interest and participation in chapter activities by the chapter membership. But are you on target? Probable accurate answers to this question are 'some times,' 'probably,' 'maybe,' etc. As any of us who have served in an STC chapter leadership role can attest, the fact is that the target is a moving one. What is on target today may not necessarily work tomorrow. And vice-versa. However, there are some 'tricks of the trade' which you can use to help you increase your on-target percentage. Come and interact with a panel of past and present chapter presidents as each shares specific ideas for increasing membership involvement and for tailoring activities to meet the needs of members and potential members.

Cantando, Mary Myers, Mark Hanigan Bruce E. Cone, Michael P. Bates and Judith N. Skinner. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Management>Community Building>STC

Identifying and Representing Electronic Engineering Resources: A Case Study in Knowledge Management

Current methods of access to the electronic resources offered by the Internet make little use of basic principles of information organization and retrieval, relying instead on relatively informal and, at times, ad hoc approaches. This creates problems in terms of the volume of information retrieved by a user of the Internet and the precision with which that information matches the user's information need. There is a plethora of engineering resources available on the Internet, yet no systematic method of retrieval is available to engineers who are in need of the most current information in their discipline. The Internet is often the only immediate source of the most current engineering resources. The purpose of this project is to identify electronic resources that could be of value to engineers and to represent these resources in a manner that enables engineers to make timely, informed decisions about the usefulness of the resources. This paper addresses the specific objectives the project which include: 1) the development of selection criteria for electronic engineering resources; 2) the identification of electronic resources of interest to engineers, as defined by the selection policy; and 3) the creation of abstracts for these electronic resources that will include at least two hyperlinks to other related electronic resources.

Connaway, Lynn Silipigni, Rochelle Logan, Christopher Brown. ISRDP in Digital Libraries (1997). Articles>Knowledge Management>Information Design>Engineering

Identifying the Components of Your ROI

Identifying Return on Investment (ROI) for your content management business case begins with a thorough analysis. This article reviews the information you need to gather to identify ROI for an effective business case for content management.

Rockley, Ann. Rockley Bulletin (2004). Articles>Content Management>Assessment>Business Case

Identity, Research Funding, and Political Economy

Five presentations about supporting research, particularly for junior faculty, within the present funding and support structures offered by academic departments.

Rude, Carolyn D., Kelli Cargile Cook, Ryan M. Moeller, Cheryl E. Ball and Joanna Castner Post. CPTSC (2005). Presentations>Management>Research

If They Don't Test, Don't Hire Them

The single best indicator as to the overall competence of an interaction design team is their plan for user testing. If you are presented with no plan or a sort of vague 'and we'll eventually do some user testing,' you may want to back off and look at other resources. If, on the other hand, you are given a proposal outlining repeated design and test cycles, you are dealing with people who know exactly what they are doing.

Tognazzini, Bruce. Nielsen Norman Group (2000). Articles>Project Management>Usability

Implementing a CMS: A Game-Changing Corporate Initiative  

The success of a CM project depends not just on process management, but on change management as well. Discover the ways that an organization can help its staff overcome initial resistance to change.

Hamer, Emma C. Intercom (2007). Articles>Content Management>Project Management