Planning and Scheduling

Although the timeline might be able to be shortened, usually it still has similar requirements to those for students and young professionals.  The conference travel and registration needs to be budgeted, and authorization for public release of the paper/presentation and ITAR review needs to be scheduled into the process.

 

Put together a milestone calendar of when you expect to get certain tasks completed.  Because scheduling time can be so difficult, plan a little extra time in your schedule and try to keep the deadlines.  Always set your own deadlines well in advance of the actual deadlines.  Thus if the final paper submission deadline is the first of December, set your personal deadline a few weeks before that to give it a final editorial review and to give yourself some emergency leeway.

 

Mentoring Young Professionals

Use the opportunity to mentor an unpublished young professional.  There might be some experienced employees that have the corporate knowledge of the company, but by having a young professional interview them and take on the project, that corporate knowledge gets passed on to a new generation.  Furthermore, the young professional will learn the process of writing and presenting a paper; thus when they write their first paper on a technical project, they will already know the process, and be able to do a much better job of it.

 

Pick the Topic

15 to 25 year anniversaries in a company are a crucial time.  It is between these years in the life of a company that they start to lose their corporate knowledge; founders retire and key personnel die-off.  A history of the company is not only good for recording the history of the industry, but gives the organization a handy resource for future uses, and provides a permanent record that can always be accessed; even for a centennial event 75-years later.  Other topics to consider are unique facilities, projects, programs, products, or individuals.  This is not an advertising opportunity, but an opportunity to document the history of an important aspect of the company.