|
|
In Documentation Process and Content Management (ETWR 2477), you team-write simple chapters for a project-management application and take a documentation project from competitive proposal straight through to completion, moving through important phases such as initial proposal, team building, documentation plan, scheduling, prototypes, style guide, drafts, edits, peer review, revisions, and finished deliverables.
Your teams will divide into typical roles such as coordinator, writers, editors, and graphics specialists, although each team member regardless of role will write a simple chapter. Although your team ids welcome to use whatever application you wish to schedule and track your project (typically an Excel spreadsheet), your documentation of simple PHProjekt tasks will show you a typical way projects are set up and managed. To develop your project collaboratively, please use a CMS like Google Docs. This course is not ready yet. Check back May 29. Thanks.
Getting organized. In this first week, read about the schedule, policies, objectives, and requirements for this course (using links in the gray panel to the left and up). I'll ask you to fill out the online questionnaire below (your information will be kept confidential), write a brief get-acquainted memo that will be posted on our course website so we can all get know each other (it will be password-protected), and fill out the skills, talents, preferences profiler so we can know how to set up teams! Creating a blog with WordPress. You'll create a blog, open to members of our class, in which you introduce yourself to the rest of us and summarize what you read about management of documentation projects. Getting to know you. Use various social-media tools getting to know each other and finding out what your strengths, experience, aptitudes, and preferences are in terms of documentation-team roles. You'll also use a profile questionnaire to get a sense of these same matters. You'll divide into teams depending on how many people there are in this course.
Reading Hackos. JoAnn Hackos's Information Development (2007) focuses on the process of developing information from a management perspective. Ideally, you would have read this book before this course began so that you could apply its principles. Sigh. While some of the chapters may match up with what you are doing or will do, with the rest perhaps you can say, "Oh well, we could have done it that way." The same in the case with Hackos's Content Management (2002). Because few of us could read 1,000 pages in under 11 weeks, we'll divide the readings, summarize themi, and comment on each other's summaries. Keep in mind that you will be the expert on your chapters and may be asked for help on the details. As you can see below, the chapters are grouped into nice 100-page sets. Use the randomizing program below to find out what you'll read.
Use this week to complete your readings, summaries, and comments on others' summaries. I will evaluate your work on this unit according to the quality of your summary and the quality of your comments on all other summaries. Developing team spirit. With the number of people we have in this course, we can break up into into two teams. You'll see that you may need to wear several different hats, considering the number of roles that an information-development team can have. It would be great if we could find a social media way of dividing up into the two teams. Let's brainstorm this!
Team blog setup. Create a blog for your team at WordPress. Have some fun—give your team a name (The Mighty Eggplants?) Create "pages" at your blog in which you describe team roles, due dates, and procedures to use for project problems (such as slackers, incompetents, ego conflicts).
Content management. Traditionally, project material is developed as separate "documents" (user guides, online helps, quick-start guides, product white papers, promotional materials, reference manuals, and so on). However, in content management systema is divided into resusable "topics." This approach cuts down on the necessity of rewriting the same material for different contexts and enables assembling the topics in different ways for different contexts. This is out of the scope for this course, but be aware of it. Project topics. Here are the PHProjekt tasks you will document:
Note: Contact me if your tasks are impossible, too large, or too small or should combined with some other. Use me as thye subject-matter expert who can answer technical questions. Project estimating. To get ready to write the project proposal, you will need to know how to estimate how many hours, people, and resources it will require.
Information-project proposal. Your job right now is to write a proposal that convinces your potential client that your team has the best plan for the project, has the best credentials, and the best financials—or, well, the best balance thereof.
Project tracking. Now that your team has won the contract to do the documentation project with that terrific proposal you wrote, it's time to do some serious project planning. And that means having a system to track your project. Big, complex projects involving lots of people typically require some tracking mechanism to show team members what's due when, who's doing what, and which project details have changed. Our projects are not nearly so complex, but for the experience let's use a simple project management tool called dotproject.
Information-development plan. One of the first items scheduled in your project plan should be the information-development plan (also known as the documentation plan), which records your team's decisions about items in the documentation library, media to be used by those items, and other elements such as schedules and responsibilities.
Style guide, templates, and prototypes. At some point early in your project, develop a style guide that sets writing and formatting guidelines for the team. Be prepared to update this style guide throughout the project. Also develop electronic templates that all members of the project will use, as well "dummy" prototypes that will serve as models for the documents your team develops.
Formatting and editing. During this next period of the course, your team formats the information according to your plans, and someone on your team watches editorially for inconsistencies and other problems.
Formatting and editing — continued.
Information-development project production: output to different media. Ideally, we will dump all of your topics into AuthorIT on the computers in Northridge 4209, identify which topics go to which documents, specify the output media (help, PDF, and web pages), and then let 'er rip! I will have gone through this procedure myself and recorded an audio-visual tutorial to guide you through it. Bring your headphones to NRG 4209! (It may be possible to do a 30-day free evaluation of AuthorIT, but the database part may be a problem.)
Post mortem. When your team has completed the project and has generated the output to different delivery media, get together in some way to discuss how things went, what went wrong, what could have been better, what went right, and appoint a team member to post a summary of your meeting to your team wiki. (This includes a post mortem on this course: how things went, what went wrong, what could have been better, what went right.)
|
