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Don’t miss our upcoming and exciting Education Days 2011! Pamela Kostur of Parallax Communications will be with us to lead an exploration of modular content design and reuse. Fernando Santiago MBA PMP CSM, with 20+ years of project management experience and certified Scrum Master Certification, will share his perspective on how to integrate and adapt Agile project management practices to documentation requirements.
Modular content design approaches break content into a larger volume of smaller reusable information units supported by storage, meta-data and relationship management techniques. Regardless the project management approach or size of an organization, content-reuse generally reduces content duplication and increases accuracy and consistency across libraries while enabling dynamic and flexible development of multiple deliverables from content sub-units.
Agile project management practices increase the number of completed prototypes along an iterative development path. These practices are also characterized by increased stakeholder and client engagement so as to increase likelihood of customer acceptance of the final product. Documentation practices can be partially or fully adapted to the Agile model. Learning the key concepts and gaining practical experience can help you minimize common project risks: excess production overhead, discarded prototype work, and tight deadlines. By leveraging the gains of this approach and being part of the critical project path, you will achieve improved requirements, status reporting, teamwork and communication.
Both modular content design and Agile practices, have gained recognition in recent years and are quickly becoming standard practice.
Learn the terminology, concepts and practices of each process now and become a documentation leader capable of managing the critical documentation project path.
Register now! For more information, see the Education Days micro-site.
Agile approaches to documentation requirements
This one-day introductory training course will provide you with a solid understanding of the core knowledge, terminology and concepts that define the Agile project management approach. A comparison of various project approaches highlights the key differentiators of Agile methods, and the implications within product development environments on communications, documentation and other related processes.
Hands-on exercises done in small groups provide practical preparation for applying the communication methods and concepts with a combination of basic tools, including Excel. You will become comfortable defining user-stories, as well as creating and sizing a project work item backlog. You will become confident defining "Done!" in the context of your project, be able to articulate project work velocity, plan work iterations, and generate tasks from backlogs and communicate the status of iterations using accumulated data. By the end of the course, you will be able to establish scrum procedures, a project backlog, a burndown chart, and have practical experience executing basic project iterations.
This course is intended for beginners or those with some previous knowledge or experience with Agile practices.
Writing modular reusable content
Modular content design approaches break content into a larger volume of smaller reusable information units requiring storage, meta-data and relationship management techniques. Regardless of the project management approach or size of an organization, content-reuse generally reduces content duplication and increases accuracy and consistency across libraries while enabling dynamic and flexible development of multiple deliverables from content sub-units.
In this course you will learn the key terminology and concepts related to modular documentation design. You will then learn how to analyze content, plan and structure content deliverables and the reusable content modules that will be required to satisfy the independent and collective deliverable requirements. Lastly, you will learn how to apply structure to the writing within the modules to maximize the clarity, accuracy and consistency of the module content which can be integrated with and used alongside writing guidelines.
This course is suitable for technical communicators with varying amounts of experience, from novice to well-seasoned.
Gwyneth Evans
Public Relations Manager
