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Bill Hackos, Comtech Services
No, we don’t really want your organization.
We just want to know how your group is organized. We are updating
our organization White paper and we need your input. In the days
before the world became flat we classified writing groups as centralized
or distributed. If you have ever been involved in a management discussion
with JoAnn or me you know what these terms mean. Now with a history
of acquisition, outsourcing, offshoring, and other collaboration,
things are getting complicated.
We have developed a graphical scheme to represent departmental organization
for writing groups. We would greatly appreciate it if you could
take a few minutes to graphically illustrate how your group is organized,
using our graphics scheme. We will use your information to produce
statistics for our report but will keep numbers, locations, and
company names confidential. We will give a summary of our findings
on a future issue of the e-newsletter and at the Best Practices
2006 Conference in September. If you take part and provide us with
your data, we will send you a PDF copy of our revised white paper
at no charge when it is complete. We will be collecting data until
August 15, 2006. After that date we will not collect any more data,
so get it to us soon.
Here is our graphics scheme.
Please use these codes:
VP: Vice President
D: Director
M: Information-Development Manager
TM: Training Manager
W: Writer
E: Editor
TR: Trainer
TD: Training Developer
PD: Product Developer
PM: Project Manager
PRM: Product Manager
IA: Information Architect
DM: Development Manager
Feel free to add any codes that you need that are not on
this list.
Use a solid circle to represent a country
Use a dashed circle to represent a site within a country
Use a dotted circle to represent a location within a site
Use a solid arrow to represent supervision
Use a dotted arrow to represent contact
Feel free to add graphical constructs to make your organization
clear.
Use a small circle with a number and a code to represent a person
or multiple people with the number code representing job function
and the number before the code to represent how many people with
that job function.
See what we mean by the following examples.
This first example represents an organization with sites in Santa
Cruz, CA, Lowell, MA, and Dallas, TX. The director resides in Santa
Cruz and manages a manager and information architect in Santa Cruz
as well as a manager in Lowell and 2 writers in Dallas. The manager
in Santa Cruz manages eight writers residing with him or her, and
3 writers who are co-located with 4 developers in Santa Cruz. The
manager in Lowell manages 4 writers in Lowell as well as a project
manager in Bangalore, India. The Indian project manager manages
9 writers in Bangalore. In addition the graphic shows that training
is managed under a different director in Phoenix with a training
manager who manages 3 training developers and 2 trainers in Dallas.
In this organization, training and information development are managed
independently.
The second example represents a site in Mt. View, CA with three
product development groups. In two of the groups, writers for the
product are managed by a product manager rather than a documentation
manager. In the third group the writer is managed by a product developer.
The writers in the three groups are isolated from each other in
a completely distributed organization.
If you are interested in joining our effort, please get your organization
to us by August 15, 2006. We prefer that you send the graphics to
us in a Visio or PDF format, but we are happy to get them as faxes
or snail mail as well. Make sure that you identify a contact and
provide his or her email address so we can send you the report.
Send your emails to
. Send your faxes to 303-232-0659. You can also mail us at: CIDM,
710 Kipling Street, Suite 400, Denver, CO 80215
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©2006 by the Center for Information-Development
Management. All rights reserved.
Tel. (303) 232-7586 Fax. (303) 232-0659 info@infomanagementcenter.com
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