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Journals by EmailThursday night, Collin Turner gave a presentation on screencasting to the International Chapter of STC. He talked about best practices from planning to delivery of a screencast. He mentioned in passing that as technical communicators, we’re also project managers.
I’ve never thought of myself as a project manager, but I suppose that’s one of the hats I wear. Usually, I would think of the tech comm project manager as the one who has become the leader of a team and directs their efforts to produce and deliver content. I work in a bit of an isolated environment when it comes to my projects, meaning that I don’t collaborate with other writers on my content beyond asking for content reviews or opinions on usage. I’m the only one who writes documentation for the development projects I work on.
But I suppose I’m still a project manager in a sense because every documentation set consists of one or more projects. An online help system or animated demonstration is in itself a project. I’m responsible for the planning, development, and delivery of each one, moving it through from concept to reality.
Personally, however, I’m something of a loner. I like to manage and implement the deliverables myself. I hear about projects where multiple writers have to worry about source control. The skilled project managers are the ones who can help the writers work on a source-controlled project without blocking each other’s progress. Fortunately, the projects I work on are not large enough to need thousands of pages of documentation. In fact, I work on multiple projects simultaneously, so we’re not approaching the need for a full team any time soon.
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