I was reminded recently about how much the successful management of remote writing projects relies on common sense, communications, and teamwork. Looking back over previous part-time remote projects I’ve worked on the lack of one of those elements usually made for a lot more difficult of a project.
However, I’m the first to say that communications are a two way street between the remote writer and the mother ship.
The forgotten player is the success of Microsoft SharePoint is often the guy on the project team who makes SharePoint work for the team from a combination of their prior experience and seeing the potential in SharePoint to solve some sort of existing project-level problem whether it be dealing with project management, collaboration, or communications. Organizations who take a few simple steps to create a culture of SharePoint champions are going to reap the benefits in their business without a heavy financial outlay.
Here are some things organization can do to foster a culture of SharePoint champions:
As a cloud-based task management application, Do.com greets you with full HTML 5 goodness. It’s a real slick and responsive task management application for individuals or project teams. I’ve long been a believer in the democratization of project management data and how cloud-based applications can help geographically dispersed project teams collaborate and communicate during projects. read more
With the cloud becoming more the project management platform of choice, the market for cloud-based project management tools is really heating up. Cohuman – now owned by MindJet, of MindJet MindManager fame—is in the same league as Asana and Do.com but touts more control over tasks and projects with their locking feature. Cloud-based project management tools are great for freelancers and project teams because they are easy to learn and implement while owing no allegiance to any particular project management methodology.
Before crossing back over to full-time work, I spent much of my career as a contract technical writer. It was a good time until the economy tanked and even let me work remotely on some contracts.
As the economic apocalypse lingers, I am noticing fewer part-time remote projects as I once did. Combined with some recent online conversations I’ve come across, I got to thinking about the times I’ve seen remote technical writing projects work and not work for both the organization and the writer.
I first worked remotely as a freelancer in the computer book publishing industry and later as a technical writer.
If you are on the hunt for a remote technical writing project, remember these things make them (im) possible:
The launch of Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft’s new collaboration tool suite that includes SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Lync Online, Office 2010 Web Apps, and Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus brought a lot of headlines because anything cloud is hot right now. Nevertheless, project management features were absent from the marketing push unless you knew where to look.
While maintaining technical documents can be the most boring part of the technical writer’s job in some organizations, it’s a necessary part of the business especially in the federal government and other policies and procedure driven environments.
However, updating documents often falls down the list of priorities and becomes a reactionary task versus a natural element of business operations. This leads to such a simple task being flubbed and lapping up more resources and operational budget than first thought.
I am seeing more smaller contracts now for writers to come in an update technical documents especially policies and procedures guides and got to thinking how I like to update documents:
Managing project documents can be an underappreciated art in some organizations. It’s an area where a technical writer should take charge. I’ve seen document control of all stripes throughout my career ranging from document control that works; document control that didn’t work; document control that is overly complex, and even somewhere there was no formal document control in place to begin with.
While compliance programs like COSO and Sarbanes Oxley require document control over project documents, it also makes good business sense.
Here are some tips for implementing document control within your project team or organization:
One of the reasons why I find project management applications so interesting and have written about them in the past is because the good project management applications are communications tools at heart. Throughout my time as a contract technical writer, I’ve seen inside project management organizations of every stripe and the quality of project communications separates the good from the bad PMOs almost every time.
This lead me to become a big believer in the democratization of project management data because project management data needs to be accessible to everyone involved in the project lifecycle including executives, stakeholders, project management, and the people doing the actual work. When project managers and PMOs cage their project schedules and other management data in tools like Gantt charts they risk losing some of the audience for the information.
It’s never fun watching a technical documentation, training development, or other writing projects get off to a false start or just downright fail. It can be a real morale blow and expose the writer(s) and their team to heavy criticism from stakeholders. However, failures do happen and it is best to do what you can to recover from quickly.
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