Course Description:

Document Manager. This course is designed to give you a sense of what is involved in the job description of a technical document manager. Because a document manager is likely to be your boss as a professional or technical writer, it also suggests industry expectations and experiences for such positions.

What is the job really like? Some time ago, the STC (Society for Technical Communication) journal, Technical Communication, published an article on what technical writers thought of their M.A. programs after working in industry for 10 years. The universal complaint was that they were taught nothing about the actual working conditions they found in industry. One writer said: "I was prepared to be a good technical writer. I was not prepared to deal with the environment of corporate America." Another suggested that "'The reality of dealing with SMEs [subject matter experts] should be in the curriculum for any professional writing program." A third writer said, "Not once in my career have I reported to someone who at some point was a writer, or knew anything about it." This course not only seeks to acquaint you with corporate working conditions for professional & technical writers, it also seeks to provide you with the skills needed to successfully compete in that environment.

Hackos' earlier book focuses on discrete or individual document or project production. Her second book focuses on "information development" as an ongoing process that develops an archive of material that can be used to produce documents or projects. Information development assumes that a company supports this activity or department, which is, as you can imagine, a significant investment. It seems desirable to first understand processes involved in producing discrete documents before aspiring to work as an information developer. For this reason, I have decided to stay with the earlier text for the class while also providing support for Hackos' second book.

Project Management. Let's clarify the name of the course. This is not a course in project management in the business sense. You may know that there is:

• a Microsoft Office product called Microsoft Project. 
• a Project Management Institute that, among other things, certifies professional project managers.

• a 14 hr. online Project Management Certificate offered by UC-Berkeley & other universities. NAU offers a project management emphasis in its Master of Administration degree.

Project management in the business sense is a professional specialization often associated with scheduling events or steps in commercial construction or engineering projects. Our course focuses on the management of publication projects. Most writing courses offered by the English dept. of a university focus on a single writer who produces a document exclusively controlled by the author. In this course we recognize the situation in business & industry where the focus is on team produced documents (with content usually controlled by an SME) that are responsive to product design & development, including usability testing. This means they are developed from a concern for audience needs & NOT produced to be self-expressive or narrative.

There are 3 levels to our topic of document management production:

• Hackos offers a long conceptual walk-through of the project management process applied to document production & control. She implies management difficulties, but is not entirely explicit about the position of a document manager & the typical problems she is likely to face.
• DeMarco offers a description of the climate, background, & values that support the kind of teams that Hackos talks about managing.
• The third level of actually managing document production is suggested and described, but not developed in detail. Those who are especially attracted to the job of document project management or information developer should consider learning to use Microsoft's Project Management software.

Narrative Development. English majors are not the only ones who discover what they mean or how they want to organize a document or project through the process of developing & writing the project. By the end of development, product managers are often ready to go back & do the project again, "the right way," by reorganizing, rewriting, etc. Project management was developed to curb this expensive tendency to do the project twice. English majors are familiar with the process of narrative development. We often literally do not know what we think about an issue until we write an essay about it. Technical writing in general, & document project management technique in particular, forbid professional writers from using narrative development. Documents are developed from thinking about audience needs in a process that relies on organization through explicit, logical development using a decimal outline & or informative headings. This course is about how to use planning techniques, instead of narrative methods, to write technical documents.

The Publication Process. "As publications project manager, your job is to take charge of the publications projects & to guide them [through the development process] so that customer needs are met & schedules & budgets are maintained" (Hackos, 81).  The publications process often follows a 5-step program:

1. Information planning to initially define customeraudience needs & the type of documents required.
2. Content specification that elaborates the first step after researching the project. This content is often contributed by an SME (subject matter expert).
3. Implementation; this is the stage in which documents are written, edited, verified, & audience tested.
4. Production: printing, binding, distribution, Website release.

5. Evaluation & revision (esp. for Websites).

• Each unit has a what to do page that specifies assignments for each unit. 
• In each unit you will read selections from the course texts. 
• In each unit you will read explications of the texts.
• There is a quiz on the Hackos text for each lesson.

• Each lesson requires you to do short work based on the material in the relevant chapters of Hackos & on a bit of Web research.  You will post your answers to the discussion section for each unit.

• A major paper (10-15 pages) is required. This can be either:

  • a simulated or actual project plan.  

  • an analytic paper of a managed project. See this example.

BBLearn: If this is your first online course, it will take you some time to navigate the system & to learn to use the tools it offers, such as attachments to email, reading & posting discussion, & composing & posting html documents. 

Each unit is designed for 10 days of study.  Use the calendar tool to check dates. 

What to do in the course:

Assignments:

Each unit has several components.  The table illustrates a sample lesson providing directions for completing unit 03:

Grades: Notice that lessons do not offer the same number of points. (The numbers may not be accurate,
but the table does illustrate relative importances. For example, it is obvious that the discussion posts are
the major activity.) 

90% (505 points): A
80% (449 points): B
65% (365 points): C

Submission Deadlines: A day or two late is acceptable with no explanation required. Watch the calendar. I will not accept material from lessons two units prior to the one we are studying. If the calendar says we are working on unit 5, I will accept late work from units 4 and 3, but not earlier. The grade for work submitted a week late is reduced by 10%; two weeks late by 20%.

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