Sunday, June 1 - Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

MP: Managing People, Projects, and Business

Proposals in this track should explore how managers can promote the business of technical communication, generate effective results for the organizations we serve, challenge staff to unleash their human potential, and grow.

A Delicate Balance: Resolving Ethical Conflicts in Technical Communication

Technical communicators may face a wide range of complex ethical conflicts. This workshop explains how to systematically apply ethical models in a 6-step process of value analysis to identify and resolve such conflicts.

Agile Development: Challenges in Transforming Technical Communications Departments

Agile is an engineering-centric development model which advocates "just enough" documentation, be it requirements, design specifications, or end-user documentation. High-tech industries are shifting from a traditional, waterfall development process to agile development processes such as SCRUM, XP, and CrystalClear. This session describes ways to help technical writers and associated teams deal with challenges in planning and implementation, particularly when writers move from team to team.

Assessing the Maturity Grade of Policies & Procedures Programs

Learn a unique and simple model for rapidly assessing how well an organization’s P&P program is positioned for providing performance-based communication. Discover the maturity grade for your organization’s P&P program and how it compares to others.

Best Practices in Management

This is your opportunity to meet with technical communication managers and get new ideas for managing your projects and your people.

CIC SIG Progression—Introduction to Consulting and Independent Contracting

This progression features topics of interest to self-employed technical communicators and those who would like to be self-employed.

Communication Strategies of Successful Virtual Teams

Effective technical communications are paramount for successful virtual teams. Add diversity of cultures, locations, and functional ability, and you have strategic communication decisions to make. Come learn from some veterans.

Convergence of Authoring and Translation in the Web 2.0 World

The concept of Web 2.0 is gaining much attention in the popular media. What impact do new technologies and workflows stemming from the next generation Web have on the way technical authors and translators work together?

Deconstructing a Proposal Effort: Cold Chills, New Pastures

Discusses a proposal effort event-by-event as it happens by reviewing the interactions and e-mails between team members and how a team constructed a proposal from the ground up in a period of three weeks.

Dissecting a Project Objective into Business Requirements and Use Cases

This mini workshop explains and demonstrates the process of "taking apart" a project objective to determine its "component" business requirements and use cases. Afterwards, participants break into teams to complete this process themselves.

Globalizing Garmin: Finding the Way and Other Points

Spent a million dollars lately? Whoever said talk is cheap obviously didn’t have it translated! Learn how to establish a localization group in your company and factors you should consider.

Navigating Unfriendly Waters in Software Development

This case study illustrates methodology used to implement corporate-level changes in how documentation is re-branded as a fully-functioning team within a software shop not accustomed to working with documentation.

Paradigm Shifts are Never Pretty

XML-based authoring requires a significant change in mindset for the authors. This paradigm shift is painful and many proposed XML implementations are met with trepidation, uncertainty, and even outright hostility. Why is this?

Self-Directed Work Teams for Technical Documentation

This case study discusses how PayPal created a cross-functional self-directed work team created to rewrite and rearchitect its technical information for merchants and developers.

Unifying Content Development and Localization at Palm

In order to improve its ability to serve global audiences, Palm integrated information development and localization into a single organization. This enabled Palm to increase the volume of accessible content without sacrificing quality.

Updating a Corporate Style Guide: Process and Reality

Learn from our experience with updating an existing style guide, including scheduling, working with a geographically diverse team, tracking change requests and resolutions, incorporating changes, and handling the review process.

Workplace 2.0: Managing Conflict and Fostering Success in Collaborative Teams

This session will challenge conventional beliefs about how collaborative teams can improve their productivity and increase their effectiveness. You will learn various collaborative strategies for success, how to recognize a classic conflict spiral, how other cultures manage and resolve conflict, and tools for managing conflict early in the process.