Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People

Chapter 18. Keeping Your Project on Track

	Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.
	--Peter F. Drucker

In preparing your Project Plan, you completed the Planning Phase of your project, at least from the perspective of project management. Depending upon the complexity and uncertainty of the Planning Phase, you have used about 10% of the total time of the project for planning activities. Throughout the design and Development Phases, you are likely to spend between 5% and 20% of total project time managing the information-development activities. The percentage of project management time depends upon how difficult the project will be to manage.

At the beginning of the Design and Development Phases, you and your team members already have the baseline information you need to proceed with design and development. The major activities associated with design and development are handled by the information architect and the information developers assigned to the project.

The information architect is responsible for identifying the topics that must be created to produce each of the major deliverables that are on your schedule. For example, the architect knows what information is typical of your organization’s user and installation manuals. If this is a new project, the architect determines what topics need to be created to complete the user and installation ...