Project Management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives.
#30510
Information Metrics: Keeping Your Writing Projects On Track 
Keeping information metrics for documentation projects gives managers the ability to more accurately estimate future projects. Publications departments can develop their own tools or they can use existing tools to track such things as page size, hours-per-page spent writing, illustrating, editing, and producing manuals; and the dependencies of each manual. This kind of information can help to determine development schedules, show how late changes affect the documentation process, and accurately determine what it will take to complete quality documentation on time and within budget.
Gordon, Judy L. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Documentation>Project Management>Methods
#18985
Information models are a critical component of single-sourcing, enterprise content management, and dynamic content management. This session explains how to design information models, including information product models and element models. It also explains the role of metadata and how to effectively design it.
Rockley, Ann. STC Proceedings (2002). Design>Content Management>Information Design>Metadata
#29913
Information Modeling: A Practical Approach
Information models are a critical component of single sourcing, enterprise content management, and dynamic content management. The information model is your blueprint for the effective writing, structuring, and delivery of reusable content. This session explains how to design information models, including information product models and element models. It also explains the role of metadata and how to effectively design it.
Rockley, Ann. STC Proceedings (2003). Articles>Information Design>Content Management>Project Management
#19781
Information Planning for Successful Online Documentation
Creating an information plan should be the first phase of any publication development life cycle, whether hard copy or online. The plan is a tool for reporting the results of your research about your audience, their tasks, the market, and the product. The plan presents the basic organization and content of the publications you intend to build, effectively directing the documentation team to produce a publication with very specific goals in mind.
Stevens, Dawn M. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Information Design>Management>Documentation
#29783
Information Product Development Process Quality: Vision, Process, and Implementation
Two members of the management team from LSI Logic Storage Systems' Technical Publications Department review how their team developed a vision statement and an information product development process based on that vision statement. The workshop provides participants opportunities to learn about the value of vision statements and production processes as well as to begin developing these materials for their own organizations. Participants will also share ideas on how to maintain process integrity through customer focus, team feedback on product and process quality, and strategic continuous improvement. Participants will receive materials that enable them to draft their own vision statements, information product development processes, and continuous improvement team operating practices.
Burroughs, Dia H. and Randy Clark. STC Proceedings (2004). Careers>Management>TC
#31533
There are crucial behaviors important people, successful executives, and true leaders use to move processes and people forward. These behaviors are the key ingredients of leadership. The more of these ingredients leaders take to heart, teach, and expect of others, the more power they will have to achieve their objectives.
Lukaszewski, James E. Communication World Bulletin (2003). Careers>Management>Business Communication
#23988
During recessions, uncertainty prevails, and like a driver trying to weave his way along a mountain road in heavy fog, many businesspeople eventually tire and just pull their businesses over to what seems like a safe embankment, turn off their engines of innovation and progress, and wait for the fog to lift. But how long can one afford to sit on the roadside? At what point does it become riskier to do nothing than to proceed with caution? One has to wonder if there's a better way, a way to keep moving forward in measured, confident increments, rather than eventually creating an additional element of uncertainty by deferring innovation altogether.
Fleck, Pat. Cooper Interaction Design (2002). Design>Project Management
#14175
Integrating Content Management with Portals: Meeting Enterprise Information Needs
Effective communication is a top priority for most businesses. To help create, manage, and access information that is used to conduct e-business, technologies such as content management (CM) and enterprise information portals (EIP) are dominating IT and CIO discussions. We will review how these rapidly evolving technologies come together to provide benefits for enterprise implementers. Given the historical deployment of these technologies, many associate the application of content management solutions to externally facing sites, serving transactional e-business needs; and the application of portals to internally facing sites for general employee access to a wide range of information sources and applications. However, both technologies can provide support for the complete information lifecycle, from information creation to management to delivery.
CAP Ventures. Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Content Strategy
#14656
Intellectual Capital: Placing a Value on Technical Communication
Carliner discusses the emerging discipline of intellectual capital, which attempts to develop accounting techniques for quantifying the 'brainpower' of corporations. The new service-oriented economy, Carliner argues, renders traditional accounting methods inadequate for determining the value of intangibles such as policies and procedures, the knowledge of a staff, and relationships with customers.
Carliner, Saul. Intercom (2000). Articles>Knowledge Management
#18674
INTERACTIONARY: Sports for Design Training and Team Building
This is an experiment in design education. The idea is to explode the process of design by forcing insane time constraints, and asking teams of designers to work together in front of a live audience. From what we've seen, it forces the discussion of design process, teamwork, and organization, and asks important questions about how designers do what they do. Below are summaries of previous events, and information about how to organize your own Interactionary.
Berkun, Scott. UIWeb (2001). Articles>Management>Collaboration
#10236
Interactivity is one big reason why the Internet has become so popular. People like to talk to each other, and they relish the chance to talk back directly to the media. And from the media's perspective, interactivity is one way to obtain a steady stream of free and diverse content (and also to enhance audience interest and loyalty). Therefore, it's a shame that many traditional news and media organizations don't have a clue about how to do online interactivity well.
Gahran, Amy. Contentious (2001). Design>Knowledge Management
#24602
The Interdisciplinary Rodeo: How to Wrangle Diverse Professionals Without Getting Gored
Interdisciplinary work is complicated by communication and collaboration problems. Technical communicators can serve as effective interdisciplinary team facilitators if they predict and prepare for the linguistic and political problems many interdisciplinary teams encounter. Effective preparation includes preliminary research to define key terms and identify political concerns. Interdisciplinary team facilitators must also establish their own role on the team and help other members understand the benefits and difficulties of interdisciplinary collaboration. Finally, facilitators must establish a system to archive the work of the team.
Adlin, Tamara. STC Proceedings (1996). Careers>Management
#26805
International Corporations and Cross-Border Knowledge Transfer in the Semiconductor Industry
Are international corporations superior to markets and alliances in facilitating the flow of knowledge between countries? Despite widespread acknowledgement of the superior efficiency of the firm in international knowledge transfer, the theory remains underdeveloped, and empirical support is conspicuous by its absence. This paper has two primary goals. First, to use patent citation data to compare the relative performances of firms, alliances, and markets in the transfer of technological knowledge between countries. Second, to investigate the reasons for the superior capability of the international corporation in facilitating cross-border knowledge flows by examining the mechanisms through which international firms manage international technology transfer. Our findings confirm the superior performance of firms over both alliances and markets as conduits for the flow of knowledge between countries. A more detailed examination of the experiences of five large semiconductor firms suggests that this superiority is the result of its ability to utilize a wide range of knowledge transfer mechanisms flexibly and in combinations with one another, and to embed these transfer mechanisms within a social context that enhances their effectiveness.
Carnegie Bosch Institute (1998). Articles>Knowledge Management>Workplace
#24958
International Project Management
Declining domestic markets have opened global market opportunities to our entrepreneurs, A research has been made to determine if foreign clients view American project managers with suspicion. Some major problems encountered were: the lack of sociocultural sensitivities and failure to 'do our homework:' prior to taking on a foreign presence as an international project manager. Communications and inadequate foreign language knowledge are major problems. Overly aggressive behavior as guests in a host nation without respect to their social cultures can be selfdefeating. You can win!
Hamlett, James G. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Project Management>International
#10721
International Technical Communication
Here are four case studies in international technical communication that I've used as teaching tools in my course World-Ready Information Products. These are real and current case studies, although I have altered some facts and added others to disguise the companies and focus the cases a bit more. I include suggested solutions to Case 3 and Case 4, courtesy of professional technical communicators who attended my post-conference workshop at the annual Society for Technical Communication (STC) conference in May 1997, Toronto, Canada. The opinions expressed are those of the workshop partipants. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions, policy, or attitude of the Society for Technical Communication.
#27870
The author discusses how managers can best prepare for an interview to ensure that the perfect candidate for the job is selected. The article also includes charts that can be used to assess a candidateï¿ï¿ï¿s performance in key areas such as tool skill level, knowledge of online help, and analytical ability.
Bailey, Elizabeth. Intercom (2006). Careers>Management>Interviewing
#13651
The Intranet as Ecosystem: A Model for Sustaining Development
The complexity of the intranet and the interrelationship between it and the organization’s overall environment mean that traditional methods for supporting company information technology and communication (in which geographically and administratively separate groups determined company standards and guidelines) may not be adequate for the new medium. Available resources are also inadequate; material for web 'authors' (writers, information architects, graphic artists, and programmers) usually focuses at the site level, and most academic and trade articles on intranets focus on the central internal home page or on aspects of the physical infrastructure. Resources covering the whole intranet generally focus on management issues—hiring staff, setting goals, overseeing the design process, selling ideas to upper management, and getting people to use the system once it is deployed. But support groups tasked with the everyday design and maintenance of the intranet also need to “manage” it—that is, to envision the intranet’s role in the overall communication and technological structure of the organization, design and maintain its architectural structure, and sustain it by ensuring its content is accurate, timely, useful, and usable.
Wilder, Pam. University of Washington-Seattle (2000). Books>Content Management>Intranets
#22082
Intranet Teams: a Leadership and Coaching Role
The intranet team often becomes viewed as a gatekeeper or bottleneck that does little more than say 'no' to business units. The business then reacts by rebelling against this centralised control, or simply working around the intranet team. There is a better way. Intranet teams should instead look to playing a leadership and coaching role in the organisation. These two approaches provide a range of techniques for encouraging organisational change and supporting staff activities.
Robertson, James. Step Two (2004). Design>Web Design>Collaboration>Project Management
#25576
Introducing a Strategic Approach to Outstanding Content Development
Great content doesn't happen by accident. By taking a rational approach that includes careful planning, diligent implementation, and well-tested delivery, vendor teams can ensure a successful project that satisfies client needs, budget constraints, and schedule demands while meeting the business objectives of both the client and the vendor.
#25279
In order to improve this situation, the "Integrated Documentation" project was started in the fall of 2002. Our goal was to place the entire documentation of a system in a convenient manner (on CD or via Internet) at the disposal of Unaxis Displays service technicians and customers. Special attention should be paid to the linking of important information which is required again and again during maintenance and service work. The project derived benefit from the fact that Unaxis has been shipping electronic versions of operating instructions and spare parts catalogs to a number of customers for several years. The required internal processes and the software had been developed by CPTec GmbH. To be consistent, the same company was hired in order to extend the existing spare parts catalog solution to an overall solution named "DocuCat".
Ratz, Günter. CPTec GmbH (2003). Articles>Content Management
#28611
Introduction to Agile Methods and Practices 
Rally's Hubert Smits provides a broad introduction to concepts of Agile software development and Agile methods. The talk is based on his experience as an Agile coach and Certified Scrum Master. Concepts that are known from waterfall or plan-driven development are transformed to an Agile perspective. Examples are release and iteration planning, progress reporting, meeting formats and scaling projects from 10 people teams to 300 people teams.
Smits, Hubert. Rally Software Development (2006). Presentations>Project Management>Agile
#27568
Introduction to Agile Methods and Practices
Provides a broad introduction to concepts of agile software development and agile methods. The talk is based on his experience as an agile coach and Certified Scrum Master.
Smits, Hubert. Rally Software Development (2005). Presentations>Management>Agile>Methods
#25120
An Introduction to Content Management
CMS analysis and design; an implementation example.
Garrett, David and Mary Pitz. STC Region 7 Proceedings (2002). Presentations>Content Management
#27567
Introduction to Scrum Practices
This tutorial brings Scrum to life by introducing Scrum principles, process, practices and roles in the form of an actual Sprint timebox. The prioritized, timeboxed topics are presented and delivered as arranged by the tutorial attendees.
Tabaka, Jean. Rally Software Development (2005). Presentations>Management>Agile>Scrum
#14688
Introduction to Single Source, Part 1
In the first of a two-part article, Butland examines the arguments for and against single sourcing, a method of producing documentation for several media from a single source. He also discusses the differences between manuals and help, and offers suggestions on how to conduct single source projects involving these media.
Butland, Philip. Intercom (2001). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing
