What She Does & How She Does It
Project Management
There is no one way to approach a project, but it’s extremely advantageous to define the big picture and the deadlines up front, as much as possible, as well as your goals, your concerns, and anything else that’s important to you and your stakeholders. It’s also important to know the state of your current communication efforts and who is involved in a project or product.
I spend time planning a project and revisiting that plan often, keeping you informed of progess, questions, and any additional information or resources that would be useful.
Writing and Editing
I routinely interview, research, and compile information from engineers, scientists, designers and developers, other project or program managers, marketing representatives, service personnel, and other subject matter experts as well as published sources, including your current documentation.
Besides managing projects, writing, and editing, I also
- Support and contribute to projects and teams in Agile environments
- Specialize in working with authors whose primary language is not English
- Track changes, provide feedback, and maintain version control
- Create indexes
- Write and edit for an ESL audience and for translation
- Design or improve documentation templates
- Format and lay out text and graphics
- Implement established industry, publisher, corporate, and departmental styles and standards. Style guides most often used include Chicago, CSE, APA, AMA, AP, MLA, and Microsoft [more…]. (I can also help you create your own style guide if you need one.)
- Produce and edit graphics
Along the way, I have learned and used a number of other skills:
- Business analysis—identifying business needs and recommending solutions
- Gather and manage process, project, and software requirements
- Basic website design and implementation
- Basic database design and implementation
- Usability assessment of software interfaces and websites
- Software testing (verification and validation)
- Compliance and quality assurance
I have also worked as a technical computer animator (in the forensic engineering industry), technical illustrator, and UNIX system administrator.
Tools I have used include
- Microsoft Word and the entire Office suite
- Microsoft Teams and Azure DevOps
- Adobe applications, including FrameMaker, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat
- project management and version control tools, including SharePoint
- requirements management tools
- Help-authoring tools
- Web-authoring tools
- programming and markup languages such as C shell and C++; HTML and CSS, SGML, and XML; PHP; JavaScript, Java, and SQL
- both vector and raster graphics applications
- 2D and 3D modeling and animation applications