"Project Manage Your Life" Presentation at STC Meeting

As promised in my tweet last week, here is a summary of the presentation "Project Manage Your Life" by Anita Dhir that I attended at the Society for Technical Communications' meeting (New York Chapter) last Thursday.

Ms. Dhir started with the phases in managing any project: proposal - planning - implementation - closing down. When managing professional projects, managers and/or participants sign off on each phase before moving on. In one's personal life, such sign-off may involve soliciting the help of family or friends or outlining specific tasks for the following phase. The projects a person undertakes in his/her private sphere should align with that person's life goals, whatever form they may take. Just as in professional circumstances, life goals should also be SMART: specific - measurable - applicable - realistic - time-bound.

Another aspect of successfully managing one's life is good communication, which includes visual aspects, such as clothing, as well as the tone of conversations. It takes only 7 seconds to make a first impression, but 21 repeats to change that impression. This statistic shows how important it is to make a good first impression.

In addition, today many families, as well as work teams, are dispersed geographically. This means that important visual clues in communication, such as body language, are frequently missing when we speak with/write to family members or friends who are located far away. Photos and videos can help bridge that visual gap, but the tone of any communication must be controlled even more carefully, since it cannot be counterbalanced by visual clues.

Finally, project managing one's life helps to better allocate one's time, so that activities support achievement of one's life goals. After all, time is the only absolutely non-renewable resource, Ms. Dhir emphasized. Once it has elapsed, it can never be brought back.

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A 12-Step Program for Large Projects

I just completed a 3-week-long translation project that consisted of one 700-page long source file (63,000 words plus screen shots). In the process, I learned a few lessons on how to handle such mega-projects more efficiently. Here are my 12 steps for working on such projects:

1. Read the text in its entirety (on screen to save trees) and note important/recurring terms in an Excel spreadsheet or Word table
   
2. Research the terms you noted above and fill in the spreadsheet/table. This is your own glossary.
   
3. Divide the source file into smaller files. When doing so, make both the table of contents and the index separate files.
   
4. Import the glossary spreadsheet into your translation memory software and translate the table of contents and index. Add all terms in these two files to your glossary.
   
5. Translate your first source file, revising your glossary terms, if necessary, and adding any new terms you encounter.
   
6. Edit that translation before going on to the other files. This way you will have a solid basis for recurring text in the other files.
   
7. Translate the other files, one by one. If you change your mind on a term, add it to a list of changes to make to previous files.
   
8. After translating all files, edit the translations one by one. Make the term changes you noted above while you are editing.
   
9. Now convert each of the translated files back to MS Word (or whichever format is used for the deliverable).
   
10. Check that the formatting isn't too egregiously off in the Word documents and nothing is garbled.
    
11. Combine the Word documents back into one large file, checking for missing/duplicate text at the points where the files are joined.
    
12. Send the completed translation off. You may need to use a service, such as You SendIt or Dropbox, to transfer the file back to the client, if it's too large for e-mail.
    

One more thing I learned from this project: electrical engineering is actually quite interesting. Maybe I'll pick up an "Electrical Engineering 101" book one of these days ...