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Brian:
One of the best things I can recommend is to keep a pad by you for a
week, or a month, and use it to record anything you can think of that
you wish you had been included when you received a traveling
exhibit. Its sort of an exercise in "Remember when.....".
One of the things I would most recommend adding to your bag of tricks
is an online project management site like
"Basecamp" ( 37signals.com). We use it as sort of an online water
cooler where distant partners (in-house or outside) can
communicate....We have found it to be a very effective tool for many
reasons, not the least of which is collecting the history of a
project, from inception to completion, in one place. Imagine two
years into the project, someone asks a question that has been
answered in the past. Rather than remembering the particulars - who
answered, with what email stream, or which folder the document might
be buried in, you have a searchable record. Or imagine one site
having discovered the best way to deal with an unexpected problem -
again, you can simply go into Basecamp and make the appropriate
notation, whether in a pdf file, a milestone, a checklist, whatever.
Here's another feature: I hate meetings anyway, particularly when the
problem at hand doesn't involve me or won't affect what I'm doing for
a long time. How great to have a place where only the appropriate
parties need be involved with the nitty gritty, saving valuable
meeting time, yet whatever decisions/solutions ensue become part of
the record.
Most important, we have found that something like Basecamp helps us
manage expectations - when in doubt, it gets posted. It may take a
little discipline to get everyone to use it regularly (I would say it
took us about three months), but once it becomes habit, it is
invaluable.....
As someone who is not the best at keeping up my files, and someone
who is not the best note-taker in the world, - Basecamp makes life
way better....
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