Only connect

Recently, I’ve been meeting with other project managers around my company to discuss project management, with the aim of improving my knowledge and skills. I often start out asking them what they think the most important skills are for a project manager and what project management means to them—that is, What is project management? Continue reading “Only connect”

The humble checklist

In the documentation department at Macromedia, and then Adobe, we struggled with the increasing complexity of writer tasks. Writers were being asked to handle more technical details, and their jobs began to include tasks previously relegated to production experts. As authoring tools became more powerful and complex, there were more and more things to remember to do — and often, the omission of a very simple task could have serious consequences. One document made it into a Japanese help system with an entire section in English, because it hadn’t been tagged correctly and therefore never got to Localization to be translated. And that’s just one small example. Continue reading “The humble checklist”