Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
August/September 2004
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Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter August/September 2004 |
"How often have you been forced into making quality concessions late in a project -- dropping indices, shortening chapters, eliminating information, and so on? How often have you experienced delays, long nights. . . weight gain, grumpiness, and the 'We're adding five new features' syndrome?"
Tim Bombosch, who holds a doctorate from Stanford, a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute, and who has managed projects for over 15 years, asked these questions of the June 14, 2004 San Francisco Chapter STC audience, and quickly assured them that project management techniques can help defend against these frustrations and more.
Further, Bombosch assured the audience that project management is an organic component of what technical communicators do.
"Our work is project-management oriented," said Bombosch, "we make things."
However, potential employers and others will not know about those unique skills unless technical communicators develop and advertise them. Bombosch asked the group how they commonly identify themselves and found that, like most TCs, the audience members identified themselves as writers and by the technology they use and write about.
"We talk this way because it's how job ads are written," explained Bombosch.
By enhancing these nascent skills through education and training, Bombosch said, TCs can earn more respect and money, and add value to any organization they join.
Bombosch outlined the five stages of a properly-managed project: initiation, planning, execution, control, and closure. Project requirements in the initiation stage give rise to a plan or baseline that will be implemented in the execution stage, monitored in the control stage and finally, dissected during close.
But Bombosch pointed out that all projects are iterative, and stated that "movement between phases does not progress sequentially."
Each of the five phases is equally important. To illustrate, Bombosch shared the story of an internal tool he helped develop for a major IT corporation. He neglected to go through channels and, together with a programmer, wasted six weeks trying to rework the project only to learn that the changes he and the programmer made prevented certain data capture envisioned by the project's lead.
Here, the STC audience debated Bombosch as to whether there was an actual need for PM in technical communication. Why had the changes made by Bombosch and the programmer been necessary in the first place? Because the original idea was flawed. The debate ebbed and flowed around this central theme: how can project management ensure that an idea is not flawed to begin with?
This led to further discussion of quality and the importance of thorough and thoughtful audience analysis, which will generate project requirements to produce a product that meets the audience's need.
Returning to his illustration, Bombosch reminded listeners that one never knows whose work we will affect when we institute change on our own without going through channels:
"Companies are complex, and projects are not islands. Loose cannons. . . cause a ripple effect," Bombosch said.
One thing everyone agreed on was that communication is the most important project-management skill of all, which is why TCs are so well suited to work in project management -- unlike developers, for example. To illustrate this, Bombosch told of one developer's project requirement document: it consisted of 50 lines of code.
Yolande Salyer is a technical writing intern at a large information technology firm.
Copyright © 2004 by the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter (www.stc-sf.org). This article may be reprinted in another STC publication, provided that the publication give credit to the author and to the ActiveVOICE as the source of the article.