Lessons from the fast food Industry

Technical documentation departments can learn a lot from industries that have spent decades collecting and analyzing process information, industries like the fast food industry. McDonald's has earned four billion dollars in cash from operations the past three years. The success of McDonald's was built on collecting information on its processes and finding ways to slash six seconds from the drive-thru line. A McDonald's manager is far more likely to know the details about his or her store than a tech doc, training, or support center manager knows about his or her department. This is, of course, unacceptable. In what other profession would such an absence of metrics and control be allowed? When you think about technical documentation and training management in this way, it's easy to see that we have a long way to go.

Technical documentation managers are being asked by executive management to provide real metrics in order to justify documentation costs, or find ways to cut costs. How is that possible without tools to collect those metrics? In organizations that value content as an asset, managers are provided with relevant training and the requisite tools needed to effectively manage their departments and the products they create. You won't see managers in these organizations using an Excel spreadsheet to track metrics manually. Nor will you see them do dozens of other time-sucking tasks that most documentation managers have to do by hand today. Being an effective manager means having an understanding of exactly what's going on in your department so you can deploy and manipulate human, financial, intellectual, intangible, and material resources to accomplish organizational goals. Managers need to stop using less-than-efficient mechanisms for collecting metrics and be given the ability to collect metrics that can help make informed business decisions based on observable, measurable facts.

Management information from content management systems

Content managements systems that provide the ability to capture and track documentation processes can help fill this void and produce better information. The advantages of content management systems are now being recognized by organizations as a way to distinguish themselves from competitors by offering better, more reliable--and personalized--information in order to gain competitive advantage and increase profits. Content quality is improved when your organization's information, and those who create it, are effectively managed.

With hundreds of systems now on the market, it's important to understand just what vendors are offering and what type of product is right for your organization. Some new products now have features that help users manage workflow and staff in ways that improve the entire documentation process. It's also important to understand just what vendors mean when they use certain terms regarding content management systems and what they can actually do to help you manage your documentation.

For example, Document Management (DM) involves controlling files such as user manuals, presentations, web pages, annual reports, brochures, animations, and white papers. These are all types of documents that need to be controlled, and are often maintained in a Document Management system. It is the process through which organizations manage whole documents; move them through approval processes, control versions of the doc, and store them.

However, documents are comprised of smaller pieces of content called components. Managing components of content--not just the documents they create--allows organizations much more granular control and helps them deliver the right information, to the right people, in the right language, at the right time, and in the right format. So, effective content management is really about managing all of the pieces of content (or components) that are used to assemble documents. Those documents can be physical documents, like printed user manuals, or virtual documents, like Web pages or information delivered to a mobile device.

Profits can be improved when content is treated as a business asset worthy of being managed in a formal, repeatable, auditable process. It's not just selling more product that leads to increased profit, but reducing and eliminating unnecessary expenses also contributes to the bottom line. The return on investment possible from effectively managing content components is one of the primary financial reasons why organizations move to content management. Today most technical documentation and training departments fail when it comes to really managing their people, processes, and documentation projects because managers lack the tools they need to do their jobs effectively.

Real-time information at a glance

Airplane pilots have a control panel in front of them that helps them make informed decisions. They can see where they are, where they are heading, how long they've been flying, how much time remains before their journey is complete, etc. No pilot -- nor any passenger, for that matter -- would accept anything less. What technical documentation managers need is a similar way to see the critical information they need to know about the projects they are managing.

Managers need to be able to see everything at-a-glance -- who's doing what, where the bottlenecks are, how many topics have been started, how many are done, how many are in editing, how many have been approved, how many are being translated, how many already have been translated, how many have been retranslated, how much does it cost to create a topic, how much to translate one, what is the cost of a reusable topic, etc. These metrics, and others, can be captured automatically by content management systems that include tools designed to provide managers with real-time reporting information to help them make informed decisions. Using software tools to collect and disseminate relevant project information is a much more effective approach to managing technical documentation and training projects than relying on team members to guess. It's the difference between someone on your team saying "it's about half done" and seeing the actual--trackable--progress and status data, and being able to act upon it in a professional, responsible, efficient manner.

Most managers don't have a good snapshot of what's going on in their departments, especially if they rely on spreadsheets and white boards to keep track of their efforts. While this approach may seem reasonable, it's not. It's based on the "good enough" school-of-thought. When we can't seem to find a way to do it right, we say, "Well, at least we're doing something. That's good enough." Unfortunately, "good enough" is neither efficient nor sufficient. When others try using the "good enough" mentality, we staunchly object. We push back when software developers design systems that create unnecessary clicks or make using the software more difficult than it should be. When they say, "Hey, it works as it was designed to and that's good enough," we say, "No, it's not good enough. It's broken and here's how it should work." We often point out when things don't work as users need them to work.

New tools address gaps in the spreadsheet approach to document management

The spreadsheet/white board approach used in many technical documentation departments relies on human beings to collect and manage data. Humans are error-prone and don't come with an audit trail. Humans also have other characteristics that get in the way of effective management of content: jealously, emotion, forgetfulness, illness, ego, etc. Content quality management software tools are designed to help managers of technical documentation teams and training departments get a grip on their content production processes and manage resources effectively, without any of the challenges human managers -- and their staffs -- can introduce.

Software vendors are starting to recognize the importance of providing software tools that automatically gather and report metrics for a wide variety of purposes. Adobe, for instance, has released RoboHelp Server, an online help and knowledge base solution designed to help technical documentation teams deploy and manage up-to-date online content, and control and monitor the use of web-based help systems they create in real time. RoboHelp Server generates detailed management reports that list online help usage activity, and streamlines publish operations by republishing only those help files that have been modified since the last publish operation. Managers can see which help topics have been visited by users and make informed decisions about what types of content users are using. This type of information is needed in order to determine whether the content we create for online help systems is actually being used at all (What's the ROI of a help topic that has never been viewed?) and to help us examine why those topics aren't being accessed. Of course, these metrics are useful, but they are only part of what's needed. Managers need to have metrics at the front end of the process as well.

Other tools like Inmedius Horizon show promise. Horizon includes a dashboard control panel that provides managers with graphical interpretations of the metrics being collected (how many DITA topics are to be created?, how many have been started?, how many are in review?, how many are being QA tested?, how many have been completed? who completed which topics? who completed the fewest? who completed the most?). Tools like this are needed by all managers.

These tools allow managers to see where any one piece of content is at any given time. For example, if writers worked hard to meet a deadline and get content in the system for review, and reviewers are behind schedule, a manager could track those pieces of content and see where they are in the review and approval process, taking action to move the process along if necessary. That avoids the "hurry up and wait" problem a lot of technical documentation departments face now. They can also help assess the amount of content writers are reusing for multiple outputs. So if a topic such as a product description or an instruction has been reviewed and approved for use, but some writers are creating new versions, a manager can see this and find out why writers are duplicating efforts--a time consuming and money wasting practice. They help managers know what is going on with important documentation projects instead of guessing or asking all the time.

Managing content creation and delivery is a complex and interdependent process. The absence of one person in a department can negatively impact other workers who are relying on content for review, approval, layout, and publishing. So if managers know ahead of time someone is going to be on vacation or has an inequitable workload, they can take action to avoid bottlenecks in the entire process. This increases the quality of documentation and reduces the chances that your documentation products will become back-end-loaded. No department wants to be the one that delays a new product launch and cause the company money in that way.

DCLNews Editorial
July 2007