DocQment

In the current posted issue of the The Rockley Bulletin, Ann Rockley reviews Document Engineering: Analyzing and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services (ISBN-10:0-262-07261-0; The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts), by Robert Glushko and Tim McGrath. The summary states that the authors “explore the document as an interface to business and provide a common sense approach to modeling both documents and services for information exchange.

“Their message is clear: To succeed in the 21st century global economy, companies need to ‘fundamentally rethink what they do and how they do it.’ And what better place to start than with the document?”"

Visit the The Rockley Bulletin to read the whole article.

There is a customer satisfaction survey for documentation online at GE Industrial. The survey is available in seven languages and addresses both software and hardware manuals.

The May issue of STC’s Intercom magazine includes the Quest for Quality column, which addresses how to build a customer satisfaction measurement survey. The example is an information product.

IBM (formerly Rational) RequisitePro is a powerful tool for writing software requirements.

This tool is most effective when you are managing hundreds of requirements. Authors write with MS Word, and the requirements become part of a database which provides flexibility in retrieval and reporting.

stpBA Storyboarding integrates requirements management with diagramming of task flows and specifications. It can be used as a standalone tool, or integrated with IBM RequisitePro.

Omnigroup has a suite of tools for the Macintosh. OmniOutliner is the application for writing requirements, and it integrates with OmniGraffle, a popular visualization tool.

The Confluence Wiki is being used for collaborative work, including writing requirements.

March 1-2, 2007. Essentials for Excellence: 19th Annual Quality Management Conference. Adam’s Mark Hotel, Dallas, Texas.

The conference will have tracks for sectors such as healthcare, government, and nonprofit organizations. Pre- and post-conference courses will provide basic introductory quality concepts as well as intermediate and advanced courses, such as Lean and Six Sigma.

On June 26, 2006, the Times of Oman reported on a recent workshop that was held on quality documentation to examine developing, documenting and managing policies, and procedural manuals and guidelines. Read the rest of this entry »

The STC website has an RSS feed, and if you subscribe you’ll receive the latest news continually. There are instructions for using an RSS reader in the Online SIG newsletter.

STC President Paula Berger sends a message to all members once a month with a full report on Board and Society activities. Watch for Paula’s message, which is also posted on the STC website.

Sharon Lynn and Elizabeth McQueen have been working on plans for QPI SIG activities at the 2007 STC annual conference. There was some response to the call for participation in a progression, so we will be collaborating with some other SIGs to have quality-related presentations in more than one progression.

The QPI SIG continues to gain members. The list is quiet, and so are the Business process and Standards forums on the STC Forum. If you are a member, I hope you will post to the list or on the forum, or write to me, and let us know what you would like to learn and experience as a member of the Quality and Process Improvement SIG of STC.

The Standards forum on the STC Forum is updated continually by the QPI SIG, and attracts posts from members who are experts on standards. Please visit the forum, and post information that you have available to share.

Please welcome our 23 new members who joined in July. The QPI SIG now has 925 members. There are 14,686 members in STC.

The July 2006 IDeaL newsletter of the Instructional Design and Learning SIG was published yesterday, and IDL SIG membership manager Sylvia Miller recounts a story from Dot Champlin, in Dot’s own words, about a play produced this spring in Rochester, New York by the Rochester Section of the American Society for Quality, with a lot of help from STC members!

“Some of our (Rochester Chapter) STC members are also members of the American Society for Quality (ASQ). Last year, the ASQ members had expressed an interest in changing the pace of their yearly conference from the usual Keynote/Sessions format. So this year, the conference chair (Amy Friend), a dual STC/ASQ member, asked an STC member (Lori Marra), who has a serious interest in play writing, to write a little play that would illustrate the basic principles of quality for the enjoyment of the attendees. She agreed, and we presented the play at the local ASQ conference in April. Read the rest of this entry »

by Wanda Phillips, Senior Member, Canada West Coast and Puget Sound chapters and QPI SIG

I’ve been working on my Six Sigma Green Belt for a year now. The training is through my employer, Philips (Ultrasound and Monitoring), and my manager selected the project. It turns out to be a huge project with the potential for incredible savings and increased reliability. As a Green Belt, I’m expected to also keep up with my writing workload.  Read the rest of this entry »

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If a post is closed to comments, it probably was the target of a lot of spam. It may be a temporary post like this one, which will be deleted when it’s obsolete.

The Quality and Process Improvement SIG is working on a proposal for a progression at the Technical Communication Summit, the 54th annual conference of STC to be held May 13 through 16, 2007 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

If you are planning to attend the 2007 Annual Conference and would like to participate in a progression sponsored by the Quality and Process Improvement SIG, please send the information listed below to Sharon.Lynn@shawgrp.com by August 18, 2006. Read the rest of this entry »

Please welcome our 45 new members who joined in June, 2006. As of June 30 the Quality and Process Improvement SIG had 903 members. This will be the official size of the SIG for the 2006 to 2007 STC year. In comparison, on June 30, 2005 the QPI SIG had 457 members. As of June 30, 2006 there were 14,463 members in STC.

This starts a resource list on standards.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology of the United States maintains a site, http://standards.gov, that is a portal to infomation on the specifications referred to in US goverment regulations. Included are a searchable database and links to websites on standards maintained by government and other agencies.