[Webinar] “Managing Technical Writing Teams” – Scott Abel Interviews Richard Hamilton, Friday, March 4 at 10AM PST

February 27, 2011 Blog No Comments

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, Friday, March 4 at 10am PST, for a lively discussion with technical documentation management expert, Richard Hamilton. We’ll discuss managing teams of technical writers in a fast changing technological world. You’ll learn tips and tricks for managing technical writers, writing projects, and technology selections, and you’ll hear real-world advice garnered from documentation managers in-the-trenches. You’ll discover the importance of managers being intimately involved in tool and technology selection, the need for collaborative authoring environments, the value of tackling fear-based perceptions and setting proper …

[Member Profile] Mugdha Amin, Senior Instruction Designer

October 9, 2008 Blog No Comments

Meet Mugdha Amin, Senior Instruction Designer at HTS, a member of The Content Wrangler Community. Mugdha specializes in workplace learning and change readiness with “proven experience” defining and developing content for medium to large scale e-learning solutions.

CMS and Change: Between Optimism and Pessimism is Realism

April 26, 2007 Blog 2 Comments

Emma Hamer of eHamer Associates provides a brief and informative article on change and content management in the April issue of the Content Management Professionals newsletter. Hamer identifies the importance of training, workshops, peer mentoring, one-on-one coaching, and other strategies that can help abate change-related problems.

Reading List: The Laws of Simplicity

March 14, 2007 Blog No Comments

Here at TheContentWrangler.com, we read. We read a lot! And every once in a while we stumble on a useful book that just resonates. Such is the case with The Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda (The MIT Press). In this 176-page effort, as one would expect from the title, Maeda explores the need for reducing complexity in all types of products and services. He encodes his lessons learned into a set of “laws” for achieving simplicity. You don’t have to have psychic powers to guess that Maeda’s first law …

On-Demand – CMS and Change: Love it. Hate it. Master it.

February 2, 2007 Blog No Comments

The folks at X-Pubs have made available an on-demand version of our recent interview with Emma Hamer on content management and change (CMS and Change: Love it. Hate it. Master it.). Listen and let us know what you think. Sound quality rating: Fair Listen to the entire show.

Podcast: How to Increase Collaboration and Performance – Interview With Emma Hamer

November 28, 2006 Blog No Comments

In this TechWriterVoices.com podcast, Tom Johnson interviews performance improvement guru Emma Hamer. The discussion is an excellent and important one, focusing on how to set up the ideal collaborative workspace, overcoming fear of change, and addressing other common change-related problems in the workplace. Topics include: Helping writers cope with major changes (such as implementing a CMS) Understanding the difference between a group and a team Radically increasing collaboration and communication on project teams Changing the way your workspace is organized Encouraging your employees to present great ideas Dealing with lack …

Dispelling Collaboration Myths: Is Your “Team” An Impediment To Content Management Success?

October 18, 2006 Blog 7 Comments

By Emma Hamer, eHamerAssociates, Ltd., special to TheContentWrangler.com In conversations I’ve had recently with TechComm Managers and Content Management Consultants, as well as with individual technical communicators and instructional designers, one question keeps coming up: How are we going to cope with the changes brought on by the implementation of a content management system? The response to my question: “What changes are you worried about” varies tremendously: Enforcing the discipline of structured authoring Identifying enough reusable content to make it all worth while Repositioning our team to the other departments: …

Managing The Change Most Forget

October 4, 2006 Blog No Comments

By Emma Hamer, eHamerAssociates, Ltd, special to TheContentWrangler.com Change management is a well-used (but poorly understood) term, bandied about whenever a new system is about to be introduced. “You need to sharpen your change management skills” managers are told. “We’re bringing in a change management expert” or “We need a change management plan” are also common refrains. I suppose I should be happy that the topic of managing the changes of – for instance – introducing a content management system (CMS), comes up in these discussions at all. But the …