College:             Arts and Letters
Dept.:                 English 
Course:              English 569: Project Management & Document Development

$:                      Statewide tuition
When:                Spring 2007
Credit:               3 hours
Instructor:          Greg Larkin                  
Office:               LA 308                      
(:                    928.523.0251                    
*:                 gregory.larkin@nau.edu      
                          Please email me inside WebCT by using the Mail Tool. 
                     This way I will have a record of your email throughout the course. 
Prerequisites:    None; graduate status

Access the Course:   http://webct.nau.edu   After registering, access the course. Use you dana account user name & password. If you register for the course, it is your obligation to access the class on or slightly before the beginning of the class. Do not wait for me to send you an email.

Texts:

1. Hackos, Joann T.  Managing Your Documentation Projects.  John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471590991. List $55, Amazon $35.

2. Demarco, Tom & Timothy Lister. Peopleware: Productive Projects & Teams, 2nd ed. Amazon $34; used $15. Dorset House; ISBN: 0932633439. This is something of a cult book. Consequently, you may be able to find it in a used bookstore.

Click here to order these books online from the NAU bookstore.

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 those positions.

What is the job really like? Last year 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.

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 MS in management degree.

• an Industrial Project Manager tutorial site.

Project management in the business sense is a professional specialization often associated with commercial construction or engineering projects. Our course focuses on the management of publication projects. Most writing courses 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 that are responsive to product design & development (such documents as software manuals).

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 nurture 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 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 to use narrative development. 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 customer/audience needs & the type of document/s required

2. Content specification that elaborates the first step after researching the project

3. Implementation; this is the stage in which documents are written, edited, verified, & tested

4. Production: printing, binding, distribution, Website release

5. Evaluation

• 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. See this example.   

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

WebCT. If this is the first course you have taken in the WebCT environment, 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 & uploading html documents. 

Each unit is designed for 10 days of study.  Use the calendar tool by clicking on calendar in the left column 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. 

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

Printing Files: In addition to reading the texts, you will read the Webpages for each lesson. If you wish to print some pages, consider these two steps. In your browser, click on file & then on page setup to change print options. For more control, open MS Word & open a new, blank document. Go back to your browser & click on edit & then select all. Right click on the field of selected text & choose copy. Paste the text into your blank document in Word. You can then change font sizes, delete unwanted graphics, change spacing, add page numbers, etc., before you print.

Some pages change during the semester. Check the "what to do" page for the current unit instead of relying on a print copy that you may have produced months earlier.

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