Communications

Communications#

As covered in the previous section on Time Management, communication is a key skill for effective time management and project delivery. Communication quality is also important for doing justice to the technical work you have done, high quality technical work and reporting on it usually go together. It is easy to let down high quality work with poor communication of its outputs.

Communication can involve many parties:

  • A staff member and their line manager

  • Colleagues collaborating on an activity or project

  • A staff member requesting assistance from ICT or operations

  • Internal announcements and updates broadcast across colleagues the organization

  • Internal technical documents available for colleagues to study

  • Technical documents and teaching materials for external stakeholders

  • Announcements and news items for the general public or funders

Much communication is based on habit, with its quality dependent on the use of available tooling and automation. Attempting to maintain a similar quality bar when communicating internally and externally has many positive effects, including gradually developing good habits and having tools and templates built up for when the need arises. It is difficult to develop a ‘good habit’ or template at short notice.

This section introduces some tools and ideas to support all types of communication at ICHEC.

Use of Templates#

The use and sharing of templates is beneficial for communication, since it:

  • gives a positive impression of a coherent organization

  • allows us to mutually benefit from each other’s corrections and refinements

  • avoids repeat work and encourages a similar standard of output

  • gives the reader a familiar structure to work with, helping skim readings and quick understanding

ICHEC Templates and logos#

The following ICHEC templates may be useful:

Use of Tools#

When communicating it is important to continually seek out and learn suitable tooling to support your work. Some basic tooling for your toolbox include:

  • Document editing software - such as a Word Processor.

  • Quick diagramming and sketching software

  • Technical drawing software, such as for architecture diagrams

  • Plotting software for scientific graphs

  • Spell checkers

  • Presentation software

  • Collaborative editing software for documents

The following tools may be useful:

Diagrams#

Diagrams are important tools for communicating ideas.

Lucidchart#

Lucidchart is a web app that can be used for creating high quality diagrams easily, which can be exported as PDFs.

Some of its potential uses include:

  • Code flow diagrams

  • Algorithm mapping

  • System design

  • Organisational charts

  • Process mapping

While Lucidchart is a subscription service, the free tier is still useful with limits on the number of editable documents and diagram complexity.

Draw.io#

Draw.io is free software for drawing charts and diagrams. It offers local storage or can be integrated with Sharepoint or OneDrive storage, making it a convenient way to share drawings without using self or third-party webhosting.

TikZ#

Tikz is a LateX package for graphics and drawing in LaTeX documents. It is often used as a basis for other packages, such as pgfgantt for gantt charts.

Mermaid#

Mermaid is a javascript library for generating charts and diagrams from a text format. You install it as a Javascript package along with the CLI (see the Handbook Javascript section):

npm install -g mermaid @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli

and then can run:

mmdc -i <input_file> -o output_file.extension

from the terminal to generate an image.

Gantt Charts#

Latex can be used to build gantt charts via pgfgantt. You can install with (and some useful extras):

tlmgr install pgfgantt standalone helvetic

Further Reading#

Whiteboarding#

Miro#

Miro is an infinite whiteboarding tool, allowing collaborative editing of sketches, graphs and diagrams. It is a paid-for, commercial product. Allowing only three live boards per user or team and locking older boards for editing.

UI design and wireframing#

Figma#

Figma is a UI design and wireframing tool. It allows close collaboration between developers, designers and other stakeholders during project design. It is a commercial, paid-for product.

Penpot#

Penpot is a free and open-source alternative to Figma, with self-hosting option.

Publishing platforms#

LaTeX#

LaTeX is a powerful and widely used typesetting system for documents. While its syntax may feel unusual and take time to learn relative to interactive editors like Microsoft Word, it can produce high quality documents with more natural support for mathemtical and technical content.

An easy way to get started with LaTeX is with the Overleaf web platform. This allows you to write documents without having to install any dependencies and also allows collaboration and online document storage. You can get started with the free plan, but ICHEC has a Premium subscription if you end up using it more.

You will likely eventually need a local installation of LaTeX, since it is used by several higher level technical writing tools you may come accross.

On Mac the LaTeX environment (TeX Live) can be installed with MacTeX. This is a large download as it is self-contained with a large amount of packages and fonts, but it is highly recommended to avoid chasing down missing resources at build time.

After installing MacTeX any further needed packages can be installed with the TeX Live package manager tlmgr which typically pulls from the CTAN archive.

You can find installed packages somewhere like: /usr/local/texlive/2024basic/texmf-dist/tex/latex/

The beamer LaTeX package can be used for making presentations. To install it do:

tlmgr install beamer pgf xcolor courier
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