Jeanette Evans: Lines & Letters

Lines & Letters

Here are some recent sample articles written for Lines & Letters, the newsletter of the NE Ohio Society for Technical Communication.

Getting more views and traffic for a blog

MOOCs, tablets, and big data: Technologies to watch

On blogging and edublog

Getting more views and traffic for a blog

By Jeanette Evans

If you get tasked, as I was, with increasing and keeping interest in a blog, you might do what I did and search for ideas on how to get more views and traffic. This particular request relates to the blog concerning work at Tri-C in connection with a Title III grant to enhance distance learning at the school with http://title3.wordpress.com/ being the blog location. In my journey for tips, I came across the http://en.support.wordpress.com/getting-more-views-and-traffic/ site. Here are two tips that stuck out in my mind.

Tell people in your social networks. Telling people in your social network about new posts and about the blog in general I think is a good idea. "You can do this using WordPress.com’s Publicize feature, which will automatically tell your Twitter followers and Facebook friends as soon as you publish a new post."
Bug your real-life friends. “Encourage friends and family to read your blog: send them reminder emails when you update and talk to them about it when you meet in person. Better still, encourage them to sign up for updates using the Follow Blog Widget. Often having a really small audience of people you care about is better than having a million visitors and not knowing any of them."

Whether you are in my social networks (I think NEO STC counts) or are one of my real-life friends, if you visit, you could find something of interest in the content area and/or as a vehicle of communication. This was an NEO STC award winner in the online communication category a few years ago, and if you scroll down the right-hand side you will see the familiar to us NEO STC logo and announcement.

I would also look forward to your ideas about areas for improvement. We created the blog so grant awardees at institutions worldwide could learn from our best practices and have access to our documentation and experiences administering the grant We also wanted a transparent forum so anyone in the local or college community could ask questions of our committee members about our activities and to demonstrate our fiscal responsibility. Hoping you visit the http://title3.wordpress.com/ blog location.

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Review: Elements of Blogging (Expanding the Conversation of Journalism)
February 1, 2017

Each with a background in blogging and teaching journalism, authors Mark Leccese and Jerry Lanson give a big picture look at blogging in the context of traditional writing and journalism. This look could be helpful to someone starting out in blogging or for a teacher looking for a good textbook for students. The approach is in general scholarly and thoughtful.

Examples appear throughout The Elements of Blogging to show how authors grew their following, and a little appears about how to monetize and/or grow revenue for a blog. The focus is on how to find a voice, write an effective headline, build an argument, and find a niche and audience. Exercises and discussion questions also appear in each chapter.

Doing a good job of explaining that blogs primarily either report information or give opinions, the authors cover topics such as news, op-ed pieces, politics, art, food, and travel. As an example of how the authors approach their topic, they write that “many serious bloggers do independent reporting, consult and link to primary sources, verify facts, and maintain high ethical standard just as professional journalists do” (page 21). The Huffington Post is an example of such serious blogging.

Other examples that appear throughout give an in-depth look at success. Talia Ralph has a success story as she notes “blogs work best when readers are responding not just to the topic, but to the person writing” (page 71) and explains about her postings as they reflect her interest in food studies and how she “lives in the world of food blogging” (page 72).

The http://www.theelementsofblogging.com site can give you an idea of the interests and style of the authors and is worth a visit. It covers topics such as academia, arts, headlines, interviewing, literature, media, news, politics, reviewing, and travel. For example, one posting is about why those in academia should blog. You get a wider audience. It’s quick. It provides an informal format for discussion.

This leads me to ask if and how we in our communities would benefit from this media and communication form.

The Elements of Blogging: Expanding the Conversation of Journalism. Mark Leccese and Jerry Lanson. 2015. Focal Press. ISBN-13: 978-1138021549. 284 pages.

Reviewed by Jeanette Evans

Note to readers: A version of this review is scheduled to appear in Technical Communication.

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Article Review: Why Online Identity Matters

“If you were thinking of hiring [someone], how would you learn more about her?”

That is a variation of the question author Brian Croxall asks in his How to Overcome What Scares Us About Our Online Identities article at http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Overcome-What-Scares-Us/145967/.

While his article addresses specifically an academic community, we can also learn something by looking at his arguments to see if they resonate in our community.

Croxall, a digital-humanities strategist at Emory University and lecturer in English, argues that today “our peers lack the time to read our work” and “before the Internet, it was hard to get published.” He argues that publishing today is not a “scarcity; now it is attention that is a scarce commodity, as we are bombarded with more and more information.”

Why not put your work on the Internet to make it easier for people to see it? That is essentially the question that Croxall asks. Here are some reasons not to do this.

1. Building a website is too hard.

2. Someone will steal.

3. It will take up too much time.

Croxall addresses each of these reasons. Building a website today is easy. If you put your work on a website you can document your ideas so you can discourage stealing by showing when you developed the idea. The time commitment may be great but you can manage it with a compromise such as a monthly not daily update.

According to the author, if you have no digital identity you run the risk of “becoming irrelevant. And in this age of rapidly shifting scholarly communication, one of the most effective ways to be a scholar is to be online.”

Can we argue something similar for those of us who work in the area of communication? The best answer I can give is maybe in some cases.

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Book Review

Strengths Based Leadership - Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow, by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, Gallup Press, 2008.

Trust, compassion, stability, hope - these are, according this book, a follower's four basic needs. How does a leader tap into these four basic needs to increase an organization's effectiveness?Through examples of specific leaders, this book answers that question. Wendy Kopp, founder and CEO, Teach for America, provides one of the examples with her executing theme strengths being achiever, competition, responsibility, relator, and strategic.

How could you know what are you strengths? You can assess your strengths by taking the online test provided with this book. Maybe a top strength that you have is communication - finding it "easy to put thoughts into words" (page 131). To lead with communication you could build trust, for example, by speaking "about people to their faces as you do when they are not around."

What leader has the most positive influence in your daily life? That is one question posed in the book (Page 252). Whether you read the book or not, you could think about the answer to this question. What three words best describe what this person contributed to your life? That is another question (page 252) to ask yourself.

This book relies on how "for decades Gallup scientists have researched the topic of leadership. They’ve surveyed a million work teams, conducted more than 50,000 in-depth interviews with leaders, and even interviewed 20,000 followers to ask what they admired in the most important leader in their life."

You might enjoy reading the book to see the results of the survey. At Tri-C, we used this book and corresponding report on our individual strengths for a department retreat, so that is something to think about if you plan an event of this sort for a group.

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About me

Writer, editor, communicator, instructor, and consultant/analyst with a broad base of experience and skill in instructions, procedures, manuals, web design, HTML, on-line help, documentation, business communications, blogging, articles, medical/scientific/technical manuscripts, grant writing, and standards development. Able to deliver workshops and instructional courses on a variety of topics. Over 10 years in a medical imaging environment as well as contract/freelance/consulting work with a wide range of clients.

What We Can Learn From Project Managers (excerpt)

By Jeanette Evans and Sandy Moses

Classic project management techniques can add to the success of projects and initiatives. We can learn much from these techniques and processes as we think about applying them to a range of projects such as adoption of a content management system, development of a set of documents, or release of a new help system. Here are some of the ideas we cover in this article:

Start with the project sponsor and approved project charter
Identify critical elements to the project charter
Remember to manage by objective
Use a project plan
Remember inclusion and the perspective of others
Understand the project process that includes initiate, plan, execute, monitor and control, and close

The Project Sponsor and Approved Charter

In most settings, success of a project is related to sponsor buy-in. The sponsor will act as your project champion, and without the support of a sponsor, people will not see value in your project. The sponsor is the visionary, and when you have roadblocks, which you mostly likely will, the project sponsor can guide you through the traffic and open the lane for you to go through. Once you have a sponsor, develop a project charter to get official approval for the project.

In developing the project charter, follow these guidelines to maximize your chances for success:

Identify the project stakeholders. Typically these are the executives of the departments the project will impact.
Form the project steering committee from the project stakeholders. These are the leaders in the areas that will be impacted by the project.
Contact the stakeholders to ask for their approval and to add members of their departments to the planning and implementation team.

Critical elements in working with the project charter include the following:

Ask the stakeholders to name and approve the project planning and implementation team members, who are usually their direct reports. In most businesses and academic institutions, the management style is mostly hierarchical, or top down, and if you ask for the input of executives as you build your team, you will have much more stakeholder and team buy-in.
Allow the project planning and implementation team members to have a say in defining the roles they will play on the team, since the charter is a contract between the team and the steering committee.
Provide some preliminary budget information when you present your project charter, to show what the project will cost and how it will be funded.
Identify a target project timeline with some milestones.

The most important part of the project charter is the scope statement. A well-defined statement of what is in scope and what is out of scope will keep the project focused, help prevent scope creep, and set appropriate and realistic expectations for the project stakeholders and sponsor.

One thing that can keep a project from being completed on time is scope creep. An agreed-upon, focused scope statement in the approved project charter and a realistic timeline should lead to a successful project. Remember, the project charter is a contract between the project team and the steering committee.

How does one define a successful project? The triple constraint as shown in the Project Management Triangle applies.

The product deliverable meets the elements of the project scope.
The project scope is well defined.
The project is on time and within budget.

Management by Objective

Here are some guidelines on how to manage by objective,
a concept that will help make your outcome successful.

Establish clear and realistic objectives to develop your scope statement. SMART—Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely—objectives should apply here.
Periodically evaluate whether objectives are being met. The project manager should provide an executive summary to the project sponsor and project team biweekly or monthly, and more often closer to the launch of the project. On larger projects, the team should meet weekly before launch, always referring back to the project plan.
Implement corrective action when a problem arises.

Project Plan

Some steps in the process of using a project plan are:

The project manager sets up a preliminary project plan and schedule with high-level milestones.
The plan reflects the organization’s work calendar—for example, the fiscal year, holidays, closings.
The preliminary project plan is presented to the planning and implementation team.
Once the milestones are approved by the team, the project manager and the project team create the detailed project plan of tasks that make up the project milestones (the work breakdown structure).
Team members treat the project plan as a living document that will change as more information becomes available and more tasks are outlined. The milestones, however, should not move too much, only within the slack built into the project plan, or the deadlines will slip.

Inclusion

In both corporate and academic settings, it is important to be collegial and include all parties that would be impacted by the results of the project. The most successful projects are those where the work includes the perspectives of everyone who might touch the project or use the deliverable. A project is worthless if the end users of the product or service choose not to use it because the deliverable does not suit their needs.

Project Process

Here are the steps in classic project management as we use them, as adapted from the PMBOK Guide. Use these proven methods to maximize the chances that your project will succeed.

Initiate

Select a project manager
Divide large projects into phases
Determine project objectives
Document assumptions and constraints
Develop project charter
Develop preliminary project scope statement

Plan

Create project scope statement
Determine team
Create work breakdown structure (WBS)
Create activity list
Estimate resource requirements
Determine metrics
Estimate time and cost
Develop schedule
Determine roles and responsibility
Identify risk
Prepare procurement documents
Gain formal approval

Execute

Finalize team
Execute plan
Recommend changes and corrective action
Follow processes
Conduct team building
Schedule progress meetings
Select sellers (vendors)

Monitor and Control

Assess team against performance measurement baselines
Measure according to project plan
Determine variance and need for corrective action
Verify scope and check for scope creep
Integrate change control
Perform risk audits
Manage reserves
Use issue logs
Facilitate conflict resolution
Measure team member performance
Report on performance
Create forecasts
Administer contracts

Close

Develop closure procedures
Complete contract closures
Confirm work was completed per requirements
Gain formal acceptance of product
Provide a project “post-mortem”
Complete final performance reporting
Index and archive records
Update “lessons learned” knowledge base
Hand off completed product
Release resources

SANDY MOSES (sandymmoses@gmail.com) is the manager of online support services in the Office of eLearning and Innovation at Cuyahoga Community College. She has an MSM in information systems in business and more than 10 years’ experience in corporate and higher education. While earning her MA degree, she worked in distance learning at The University of Akron. At Case Western Reserve University, she managed an online educational program for the Center for Science and Math Education. She has also taught part-time as an assistant lecturer in business technology. Sandy has more than 107 contact hours in project management education and more than seven years of project management experience, recently earning her Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute.

JEANETTE EVANS (jeanette.evans@sbcglobal.net) has been involved in communication work for more than 15 years in both academic and corporate environments. She received her MS in technical communication management from Mercer University. In addition to her work experience, Jeanette taught technical communication at Cuyahoga Community College in a technical communication certification program, is a frequent contributor to Intercom, and provides book reviews for Technical Communication. She is an STC Associate Fellow and active in the Northeast Ohio STC community, currently serving as co-editor of Lines and Letters.

References

PMBOK Guide, 3rd ed. Newton Square, PA: Project Management Institute.

Pages

Lines & Letters

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