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Manager's Comments from AT&T Wireless

Complex, high-value projects: Nancy’s primary project the 2nd half of 2004 was developing online help for the Action Management System (AMS). This tool is used throughout the company as a trouble-ticketing system and provides information on the network in its database. Nancy demonstrates her excellent collaborative skills on this project where she aligns herself with the tool developers, training developer, and the end users. She becomes the de facto liaison among these groups thereby ensuring usability issues are addressed and resolved and that documentation aligns with training content.

Because the nature of the AMS project gave Nancy periods of “downtime,” she was available for other project work which she took on agreeably. Nancy’s flexibility and ability to grasp the big picture easily helped her ramp up quickly on two projects she joined mid-stream. She inherited an online help project from another writer and according to the customer the transition was seamless. He says:  At about the time that Nancy came on board we decided upon a new format structure for the PRB help documentation which Nancy was able to interpret and run with despite not having been involved at the onset.  I praise Nancy’s efforts as she did a fabulous job in taking the piecemeal tidbits that I provided via voicemail and email blurbs and polished the documentation up quite well.   I must apologize to Nancy for the lack of support that I could provide but despite this she was able to provide us with supporting documentation that is intuitive and captures the steps of the PRB process.

Nancy also took on what was to have been process narrative and flow diagram work on the Access Management Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) project. The work did not materialize as we expected and instead the writers were asked to do clerical-type tasks. Ultimately, we were able to extricate them and assign them to more value-added responsibilities. But in that timeframe, Nancy—again, looking at the big picture—saw ways for the team to gain efficiencies by streamlining their internal processes and documenting them. Nancy took the initiative to write the first draft and recommended ways of making this information more accessible to team members. I can always rely on Nancy to take a process or procedure and render it into readable, understandable, easy-to-follow steps! This is one of her great tech-writing talents!  She has an eagle-eye for this kind of detail.

Processes, FEAs, FEA reviews: Nancy again demonstrated her teamwork skills and attention to detail in her work with the writing team. Nancy was a key team player in the writing group on documenting processes, especially in the 2nd half after one of the writers left the company. That writer had almost single-handedly created our eRoom document database and provided most of its ongoing maintenance. That role fell to the remaining writers who contributed various pieces to our collective body of internal knowledge, including processes and best practices. Documenting in detail what we do became even more urgent when we brought on several contract writers unfamiliar with our tools, templates, conventions, doc. posting process, etc. Nancy played a lead role in the library audit last spring in which we contacted owners of WNS Library documents to ensure the posted content was still valid and current. Additionally, Nancy took the initiative to capture several internal processes, reviewed them with the team, and posted them to our eRoom for easy access. Updates to the WRPCT Estimating Process were long overdue and Nancy took this task in her usual easy stride. Her internal customer gave her a Moment of Excellence certificate for this job.

Professional Development Goals: Nancy’s 3 professional development goals were: adapting to change, contributing to teams, and customer focus.

• Adapts to Change: My earlier comments address Nancy’s ability to adapt to change. It is not uncommon for a project to be a top priority one week, then overshadowed by the latest corporate shift in priorities the next resulting in cancelled, postponed, or reduced-in-scope projects--then inheriting or scoping a new one—all in a very short timeframe. See above comments on Access Mgmt. SOX and Portfolio Management Tool project work. Her customers clearly appreciate her willingness and ability to ramp up quickly and easily shift gears as projects proceed. A customer says: Nancy handled changes well (there were many in the content and the format of the deliverables!). . . . Nancy handled them well with appropriate questions and sometimes suggestions for improvements.

• Contribute to Team: Nancy is a natural collaborator and team player, always able to determine who key players are, advocating for the end user, and never missing an opportunity to quickly and accurately documents processes and procedures and making them easily accessible to all interested parties. She sees the big picture and makes informed suggestions on ways to improve and streamline processes, but always in a diplomatic and collaborative manner. A customer says: Nancy was present at every team meeting and contributed with, intelligent questions, not only pertinent to her work queue. Again, Nancy had the ability to instigate improvements to the documents by asking key questions.

• Customer Focus: Nancy’s focus on customer satisfaction is one of her highest priorities. She proactively made updates to the AMS online help knowing that certain changes in the tool would affect end users. I have quoted some customer feedback above, but to underscore one point: Nancy worked well with the customers to gather feedback during the beta testing and to follow up for further information after the beta was complete. . . . [She] also worked closely with the development, test and operations teams to create a separate System Administration Online Help for the AMS Application Administrators.
  
  Nancy has essentially taken ownership of the task of notifying owners of the content of the library documents that their documents are up for review. Although, due to the frequent difficulty of some owners to reply, this can be a thankless job, Nancy perseveres because she understands the value of ensuring that content in the library is valid and current so that all customers benefit from this resource.

Customer Comments

Comments from AT&T Wireless Customers:

I have thoroughly enjoyed working with Nancy over the last year.  Nancy provided the AMS Users with a much needed update to the AMS Online Help with the brand new system upgrade that occurred in July.  Nancy worked with the development and test teams as the schedule changed based on the latest information we received from the users and the hardware procurement team.  Nancy displayed enthusiasm when she met with individuals to make the online help a document that could be referenced by many users at different levels.  Nancy was able to take a lot of information from many different sources and create a file that is easily searchable and understandable.  She also asked for clarification on a topic when she didn't have all of the information that she needed.  Nancy worked well with the customers to gather feedback during the beta testing and to follow-up for further information after the beta was complete.

Nancy was a "trooper" for the AMS 4Q2004 Release.  She worked very hard to include any feedback we had received to date on the online help.  Nancy also worked closely with the development, test and operations teams to create a separate System Administration Online Help for the AMS Application Administrators.  Although this deadline was very tight, Nancy did a wonderful job of "corralling" the information from a variety of resources to put together a very useful, updated online help for our user community.

Nancy propose(d) putting all the documentation on a web site, accessible by all . . . which has been an idea that we are working towards! . . . Nancy was always concerned about the end customer and sensitive to how the information would be perceived and assimilated by the User Access Management teams.

Comment from Gary Hamrick Director, Human Resources at Lynx Aviation July 15, 2007

“Nancy worked as a Contract Technical Writer for Lynx Aviation. She assisted with critical work for our FAA certification process.” Top qualities: Great Results, On Time, High Integrity