A
Manager's Approach to the International Conference
By Walter
Hanig, President
As I write this, the annual international STC conference is only a few weeks away. I budgeted the expense and provided the justification based on sessions I'm likely to attend and how they can benefit my employer. (Of course, you could argue that getting me out of the office is, per se, benefit enough!)
I plan to spend my time in three categories of sessions: strategic planning, management topics, and tools. This approach offers something for each half of my brain. The sessions relating to strategic planning will help me analyze business trends from the perspective of a centralized technical publications group. The management sessions will help me learn from others' experiences and provide new methods for understanding different personalities and working more effectively with them. The tools sessions help me make software decisions now while considering the future. They also help me stay current with tools used elsewhere in the technical communication market, just in case. Besides, they're fun!
So, what are some sessions I plan to attend?
- Lessons Learned from Offshore Outsourcing. I need to understand the costs, benefits, issues, and experiences of others to be prepared when this topic arises, as I think it inevitably will.
- Resolving Team Conflict. All teams have conflicts, and the techniques I've used previously don't always work. There's much to be learned from other managers.
- Developing a Documentation Quality Tracking System. As much as we in technical communications believe in quality and recognize it when we see it, we must find ways to demonstrate quality in terms meaningful to our sponsors.
- Challenges in Information Modeling. Information modeling is one of the key concepts that precede content management, one of the accelerating trends in our profession.
- Choosing a Help Authoring Tool. I want to get beyond the advertising and hype to learn what tools are appropriate for what problems.
- Low-cost Content Management. Even if content management is inevitable, I want to know how we can evaluate the costs and benefits without a huge investment.
- Getting Excited about Change. We're in the middle of multiple changes in our document development processes. Learning how to persuade overworked teams to embrace change is a challenge to be overcome.
- Planning for Tomorrow: Trends, Technologies, and Skill Sets
- Strategies for Building Relationships. We need to learn how to expand the good SME relationships to marketing, product management, and others on whom we depend and serve. (Besides, it's good to support local speakers from Write on the Edge.)
- Introducing Windows "Longhorn" Help Technology. What's next after WinHLP, HTMLHelp, WebWorks Help?
- Implementing Content Management. My sense is that Content Management is where XML was a few years ago: lots of talk and a growing amount of implementation.
- XML Single Sourcing in Nokia Networks. I'm interested in whether authoring directly in XML provides the flexibility for creating print documents as well as the various online formats at any saving or additional benefits over FrameMaker or Word-based approaches.
- Information Architecture: What's in It for Me? I want to know what information architecture means to others and how its concepts can be implemented without bringing the document development cycle to a halt.
