Sharon Burton: Content Strategist

The journal Technical Communication has article that I found very interesting.

Single Sourcing and Content Management: A Survey of STC members. David Dayton and Keith Hopper.

I’m not going to do a detailed review because you all can read it yourself. But what I found interesting was some of the results.

Results

Of the 276 respondents to the survey, half reported using single sourcing or single sourcing with some sort of content management. I would have expected that number to be higher, since single sourcing has been around since at least 1996. The cost (time) savings alone make the content development method make sense. It’s just not a new technology and I was surprised that not 90% or more are single sourcing.

Drivers of moving to a single source and/or content management development method were unsurprising:

• faster information development
• regulatory or compliance issues
• translation efforts

About half the people using single source and/or content management said there are downsides and tradeoffs, which I found completely unsurprising.

These information development techniques are potentially restricting if you want to just focus on writing. These methods force you to think about how and where your content is going to be used and that can feel restricting. But it’s critical, I think, to consider when you develop information.

A surprise

Apparently, the majority of people are using Word to author and are trying to do some sort of single source and/or content management. Which I think is doomed to failure.

Word is a delightful tool for short documents. But if you’ve written a 400 page book in Word (as I have, several times), you know it’s the wrong tool to try anything like single source and/or content management. They don’t give us numbers for the failed projects that were done in Word, but I’d like to see those.

They do seem to find that more larger companies have moved to single source and/or content management as compared to smaller companies. I have to wonder if larger companies see the business benefits of managing their information the way they do any business asset. Smaller companies may not have reached that point yet.

I’d also like to know how many small companies are using Word, as opposed to the larger companies. Again, smaller companies might be using Word because they are not thinking of information as an asset to be managed.

The summation

The summation was interesting to me – the authors say that a single source and/or content management environment has hit critical mass. This information development method is now into the early majority.

But if you look at just those using a content management system (which should include single sourcing but the authors say it doesn’t have to), then this development method has not quite crossed the chasm.

There are a lot of other pieces of good info and you should look up the entire article. It’s worth it.

Original found here.

I’ve been in this industry a long time and I’ve seen a lot of workflows. I’ve been in the position of:

• Write like crazy, hoping for the best
• Plan every detail to the smallest step
• Not allowed to talk to the developers
• Easy reviews
• No reviews
  • A personal favorite reviewer who would not sign the docs off as accurate if the word “must” appeared any where in the 800 page mainframe manuals. “It sounds like we’re ordering them,” she said.
• And everything else you can imagine

My heroes have always been writers

Because I have no life, I was thinking about this as I was walking my tricolor Australian Shepherd over the weekend. During the 2.75 mile brisk walk, I was thinking about all the places where technical documentation goes wrong.

I was also thinking about my duckling engineering students. I’m trying to grow the engineers we all want to work with. This quarter, they seem very passive and helpless. I’m worried that if they don’t show more initiative that they are going to go in the box of “bad reviewers”. I’m worried about other things for them as well, but these were my thoughts.

And that made me start wondering why we get crazed bad reviewers in the first place.

• No one cares? I see such passion in other areas of the product development, so I don’t think that’s all of it.
• The reviewer finally has control over something? In the case of my “must” reviewer, I think that was the case.
• Engineers have a hard time understanding the different audience needs? I see this from some of my ducklings, so that’s part of it, I think.
• Institutional culture? I think sometimes this is the case. I worked at a place where one of the senior dev leads would stop my writers in the hall and spend 10 minutes talking about how what we did was stupid and a waste of company money and not needed. The VP of Dev didn’t think this was out of line. I wanted to do the same to his developers but I’m too nice.

Modified from the original found here.

We in the content development world get people the information they need and let them get on with their life. Fundamentally, that’s what we do, whether we write user manuals, policies and procedures, create illustrations, videos, or any other thing.

And in this information rich world, what we do is an important thing.

No one reads the manuals

If I had a US dollar for every time I’ve heard “No one reads the manuals” I’d be retired in the tropics, playing with large dogs, drinking coffee, and writing crazy stories. While no one reads the instructions is a true statement, it’s a false statement.

People do read the instructions we provide. They do. But not like a novel – when was the last time you read your employers Policies and Procedures guide, start to finish? Probably never. It’s not that interesting.

But you may have read a part of it in the last month – perhaps when you completed your expense report for attending a conference. Because you couldn’t remember what the per diem was and how to charge that properly. Because you don’t fill out expense reports often, you needed to be reminded of how to properly do that task. So you could get on with your life.

And that’s how it works

This is how our instructions are used – on demand. People rarely read our instructions from beginning to end, to see how it all turns out. Typically, people read what they need to know right now and then move on.

Perhaps they need to refresh their memory about how to run the month-end report, or how to rewire the speaker wiring for the home theater system the 3 year old gleefully pulled out, or they need to create an expense report.

So how can we help?

We can create short, to the point instructions for these user moments. I call them Job Aids, you may call them something else. But they are short overview instructions for important but infrequent tasks.

Installation is a good job aid – often called Getting Started guides. For most things, you install one time and then never again. You probably don’t reinstall your garage door opener – after it’s complete, you can happily throw away those instructions.

Other tasks that make good job aids are running end of month and end of year reporting. Not done often enough to remember exactly how to do it so a refresher is helpful. You probably don’t need to include how to run a report, because reports may be run at the end of every day. How to set up the end of year report and archive the data is similar but different.

Make them available to your users

OK, so if my users only need these infrequently, how do I get that information to them, you may be asking yourself.

You can ship them with the product, if you know ahead of time what is needed. But most of us don’t have the luxury of knowing ahead of time.

If you talk to your support people, they can give you ideas. Many of the questions they get are actually Job Aid questions. So talk to your support people and see if they get the same sorts of questions.

Then develop the job aid. Try to keep it to one sheet of paper, front and back.

Now you can post the job aid in the support area of your website. Ask support to tell callers about them. If you send a marketing thing to your user base every month or so, include links to the newest job aids to get people to know they are there.

Job aids can impact the company’s bottom line

Consider tracking statistics to see how often the job aids are looked at/downloaded and if those sorts of questions are being asked less often in Support. That’s how you know you’re being effective. Take those numbers to management as clear evidence the docs group is making a bottom line impact on the business.

Clearly someone is reading them, you can say. As a matter of fact, this month, X people read them. And Y people didn’t call support to ask about that topic, as compared to 6 months ago.

Modified from the original found here.