Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
April/May 2009
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter April/May 2009 |
Joan Lasselle's presentation, "Extending the Value of Structured Content Across the Customer Lifecycle," started with a clear review of the information lifecycle -- not just documentation, but the information that can be in marketing, technical documentation, training, or other deliverables. She then demonstrated how we can leverage structured content to increase reuse across organizational boundaries throughout the product lifecycle, saving everyone precious time and money and improving the reliability of any one deliverable.
Joan first explained a typical customer-product lifecycle, from presales to upgrade, and key points in between such as installation and learning. She then identified points where different organizations in the same company might provide different information about the same feature or procedure, which confuses or alienates users. For example, a feature name might be different between marketing collateral and the help documentation. Another great example is that a support site might have different information in its FAQ than the help documentation does about the same procedure. Finally, imagine that screens in the help documentation don't match the software. She calls this a "fragmented customer experience."
Saving our customers from such fragmentation requires that we unfragment the workflow of information development. Typically, according to Joan, such fragmentation occurs because people work in organizational silos: sales is separate from the technical publications team who never talks to training, who can't access support experts or materials. By implementing structured content that is easy for multiple teams to re-use, and by consciously working at opening and maintaining communication between groups, an organization can integrate different groups into all stages of the product lifecycle.
Typically, a technical documentation team implements structured authoring before other groups. Joan suggests that this team can perform an assessment to identify opportunities for optimization (re-use), and begin reaching out to the groups involved. The opportunity assessment involves looking at the current state of a number of factors, including current business case, customer profiles, existing content, technology, process, and resources, and then identifying what the desires future state should be. For example, the current state of content might be that the technical publications team creates a users guide in structured FrameMaker, and then the training team cuts and pastes from that PDF into PowerPoint. The desired future state might be that the training team learns how to work directly with the FrameMaker content, perhaps creating their own templates and pulling in content by reference. That way, the information is always updated in one place and changes can flow from either technical documentation or training to update all output.
In the lively discussion that resulted, Joan agreed that there are pain points. For example, structured authoring tools may seem too complex for teams other than the technical publications group to use. Joan encouraged everyone to think creatively and reach out to other groups. If the training group is afraid to move off PowerPoint, offer to train them. If there's no good mechanism for getting information out of support to correct or improve help content, you could work with the managers involved to create one. Joan also shared statistics from polls that her company conducted. These polls suggest that technical writers are being asked to support larger and larger teams, making even the smallest duplication of effort too expensive.
Joan's core concepts, that information has a lifecycle and that fragmenting that cycle leads to bad user experiences, are strong and clear, as was her advice to identify the return on investment for any new processes or procedures before reaching out.
Joan Lasselle is Founder and President of Lasselle-Ramsay, Inc., a professional services company that develops business information and learning solutions that drive superior user experience, productivity, and change.