LavaCon: You Know You Want to Go

With a name like that, who wouldn't? LavaCon's annual conference on Technical Communication and Project Management is held this year in partnership with the Honolulu Chapter of the Project Management Institute.

The conference theme:   Advancing the Art and Science of Technical Communication and Project Management. And the venue: Honolulu in November 6 - 8. And the speakers: Joan Lasselle gives a talk on Using the Balanced Scorecard Approach to Measuring Project Success. A balanced scorecard goes beyond schedule, budget, and traditional productivity measurements to show how a broad, values-based definition of success can be measured. The talk explains how to do a balanced scorecard and is followed by a case study on how Cisco Systems and Lasselle-Ramsay used the approach to measure project success. The discussion will focus on the key success factors
for implementing a balanced scorecard approach, including:
- Translating strategy into operational terms
- Aligning project goals to organizational strategy
- Making measurement a continual process
- Creating team buy-in
- Four key measures: financial, customer, internal, and learning/growth
- Methodology: how to quantify your results

Come to LavaCon Hawaii, meet Joan, and learn this new approach

Get DITA-Ready at DocTrain East

Lasselle-Ramsay project manager Tim Bombosch, Ph.D., PMP, co-presents Success Factors for DITA Adoption with XMetaL: Best Practices and Fundamentals at the DocTrain East Conference in Burlington, MA. This session will be a hands-on learning event offered in the post-conference track on November 1. The majority of the workshop will focus on DITA fundamentals and authoring with XMetaL. Participants will learn:

- Content Creation
- Organizing Content
- Creating a Publication, Bookmaps, and DITA maps

Get the details on the conference at the main DocTrain East site. The Conference theme is Producing Quality Content. See Lasselle-Ramsay there!

Social Media for Business Development

Over the Labor Day weekend there was a Bond-a-thon on VH1. Roger Moore, in monitoring the deeds of his Russian enemies in Octopussy, looked at the movie playing on the face of his digital wristwatch. Q's marvelous device hardly raises a pulse because it looks so normal to see a video playing on a small portable screen.

Then there's Mad Men. Magic-markered storyboards, typewritten copy (typed by secretaries in the steno pool), and cocktail-fueled business networking in the office and at lunch seem like the rituals of a extinct race.

Technology has rendered some former everyday practices antique while making exotic ones seem obvious. Content- and media-sharing tools like YouTube and Google Docs are integrated into the regular business tool set and the benefits to productivity are abundant. Are the social media tools, like FaceBook, My Space, and LinkedIn, equally as well integrated and useful? In the professional services business, in which most employees have revenue-generating responsibilities, social media tools can be a huge time drain. The ROI for the time investment is hard to measure and controls on the corporate image projection are scant. Which social media sites work best for business lead generation, and is that even the point? Social media tools are not meant to be the 21st century equivalent to Mad Men's cocktail tray. But since time is the precious commodity, the value of the time spent using these tools must be evaluated with, ahem, a gimlet eye.

Of course we are all still waiting for the 21st century equivalent to the conference table ejector seat.

Web 2.0 just won't go away

If you are an information development professional, toiling away in corporate America, producing manuals, or web copy, or learning modules for customers, support staff, sales, or marketing initiatives, you might be wondering about the web 2.0 communications mesh. Or maybe we should call it the web 2.0 communications mess.

If you have a limited budget and ramp-up time but have been asked to use Web 2.0 tools to improve your documentation projects and customer satisfaction, with an eye to ROI and costs, what would you pick to implement first?

• install an internal wiki
• port all the manuals to html and post them on the corporate web
• argue in favor of a CEO blog for promulgating the "authentic" voice
• do all project management online
• abandon MS Office for Google tools
  

If you are considering doing any of these things, we'd like to hear from you. It's confusing out there and it's also hard to measure results.

Why does SaaS Matter?

Software as a service is so prevalent now that it seems archaic to order an application on a CD. Online pay-as-you go tools and online file storage blur the line between locally-owned and web-based content and tools. Even so, loosening your iron grip on the CD takes some getting used to.

A NYT article on consumer behavior toward media purchases suggests that younger (under 40) folks don't have this need to hold and touch their media purchases. Downloading and single-item selection make them total strangers to this media ownership concept. They have never had 3-ring linen binders of user docs in box sleeves that signified an authorized purchase. They never kept torn off bits of packaging listing serial numbers and product keys taped to installation instructions and jammed into busted CD jewel cases. They aren't chumps willing to pay 700 or 1400 bucks for bundled applications.

Bravo to them.

But in trading ownership for convenience and easy, regular updates, what have we lost? SaaS seems to place greater emphasis on the web-based aspect of the software and much less on its features and help. For example, using Google docs makes collaboration easy--this blog is written in Google docs then published to Blogger. But for corporate doc development and sharing, the tool set is minimal and you can quickly run short of format options that render it useless except for memo-length work.

What's your experience with a free or paid SaaS app?