Five winning stories will be selected by a panel of judges, and the winning entrants will each receive an Amazon Kindle 2 as well as Dragon NaturallySpeaking upgrades for three years.
As a professional project and program manager, I spend a significant amount of time managing communications -- at least 50% of my time and as much as 80 % of my time. This starts with leading meetings, facilitating group discussions and reporting on progress and status to a wide variety of stakeholders. (Stakeholders are defined as any one or any group having an interest in the outcome or results of the project. So, stakeholders can come from any department in the organization -- from IT, finance, accounting, marketing sales or operations -- and at all levels of the organization from a clerk hired last week to the CEO.)
Managing all of these communications involves a tremendous amount of time in creating and preparing documents for a very broad audience. Anything that can help me to reduce the time and effort in creating project documents, meeting minutes, status reports, operational reports, etc. is a productivity tool that should be included in every project managers’ Best Practices for Communications.
To reduce the time in creating docks and reports, I've been using the DDNS since version 3. Over the years I spent a lot of time in training -- words, creating custom technical vocabularies and macros. I wrote a great deal of my book, Project Management Certification for Dummies using DDNS. Writing this book involved using a wide variety of style sheets, technical language, working with formal project management methodologies and standards and communicating this to a general audience in easy-to-understand terms.
I use a Sony digital micro recorder when I'm on the go in planes, subway trains, commuting in cars or even pushing in my toddler in his stroller. I use the data recorder to help dictate memos and e-mails. But the biggest payback that I've seen is with recording full meeting minutes. This also includes global telephone conferences with the device that hooks between the telephone and my laptop. Immediately after the meeting is over, I convert the meeting minutes to an MP3 format. This MP3 format is popular for producing podcasts for playback on a computer, PDA, smartphone or music player. Then, using Dragon Dictate Naturally Speaking, I create a summary document for distribution to all stakeholders. So now there is a complete record of the meeting in case anyone wants to refer to the details. Also there is a DDNS-created summary transcript document highlighting such things as: decisions, issues, risks, changes, assignments and action items.
This combination of tools and techniques enables me to spend less time creating project specific documents and in those documents involved in the general overhead administration involved in all business work. Dragon Dictate Naturally Speaking enables me to dive deeper into the project issues. So I can be more hands-on and driving the project to a successful conclusion, and it vastly improves Project Communications among all stakeholders.