Business Writing

I’ve contributed technical and business writing at all of my career positions in the manufacturing, environmental, telecommunications, and IT industries, as well as working with nonprofit organizations..

A few of my major writing projects are described below.

Project Documentation Systems

For three years I worked with a team of project managers to build IPTV facilities for one of the nation’s largest telecommunications companies. During this time we installed and updated over 60 IPTV headend offices throughout the country.

Although each site was slightly different, there was a lot of commonality between them. I saw that there would be benefits to automating some of the documentation that was required at each site, and I discovered a need to make the common reference documents easy for the Project Managers and the installation teams to access.

As a result, I developed an automated process for producing the customer-required job start documents, a database system for comparing wiring lists, and the “Everything You Always Wanted to Know” reference document system.

BellSouth Local Ordering Handbook

While working as a contractor at BellSouth, I converted their Local Ordering Handbook from two manually edited documents that were published on over 400 separate HTML web pages to a database system which automatically produced the required documentation in pdf format.

The system was based on a Microsoft Access relational database. Using the Access reporting capability, I output the guidelines in the two different versions of the Handbook required by BellSouth’s users. The database reports were then converted into two pdf files, with an interactive table of contents in each one that allowed Handbook users to simply click on the appropriate chapter or section they needed.

The new system won a Merit Award in the 2005 Technical Publication Competition from the Atlanta Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication.

PMI Atlanta Meeting Summaries

From 2014 to 2017, I volunteered to write meeting summaries for the monthly Technology Forum and Healthcare Forum meetings of the Atlanta chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI). These meetings summaries were published in the Atlanta chapter newsletter and posted on the chapter’s web site.

Nonprofit Organizations

I’ve worked with several nonprofits in various capacities including preparing a 501(c)(3) application and getting it approved, researching grant opportunities, and writing and submitting grant applications and letters of intent.

The nonprofits I’ve worked with include:

– Special Equestrians of Georgia
– Friends of Gwinnett County Senior Services
– New Haven Legal Assistance Association
– Chattahoochee High School Music Association

I have attended numerous Candid (formerly Foundation Center) seminars related to fundraising and grant writing, and was the instructor for a Foundation Center Atlanta class on how to apply basic project management techniques to nonprofit work.