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

Chapter 19. Managing as the Project Changes

	Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition.
	--Freeman Thomas

During Phase 3 of the information-development life cycle, your project is well underway. Information developers are creating content, editors and reviewers are suggesting changes, topics are being validated for accuracy and completeness, and localization and production coordinators are anticipating the move into Phase 4. If you are using a topic-based architecture, topics may already be scheduled for translation as soon as they are in final draft.

As project manager in your role as coach and team builder, you are involved in keeping the team moving ahead. Not only do you want to ensure that every individual is working to his or her potential, you want to anticipate changes that may occur in the project and ensure that you make the decisions needed for the project to progress.

At this point, team members know their assignments and are chiefly responsible for managing their own workload. In scheduling the topic interim milestones, you have worked together to predict which areas of the project are likely to be completed first, which are most likely to change, and which will be completed at the very end. However, the information developers must be alert to subtle changes in the product-development schedule. As they ...