collaboration

Improved content quality

through more effective
content management
Photo: Christian Lagerek

The advantages of content management systems are now being recognized by organizations as a way to distin-
guish 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.

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By Scott Abel and Diane Wieland
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 documenta-
tion 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 man-
age your documentation.
A few terms to keep in
mind
For example, document management (DM) in-
volves controlling files such as user manuals, pres-
entations, 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 organiza-
tions manage whole documents, move them
through approval processes, control versions, and
store them.
However, documents are comprised of smaller
pieces of content called components. Managing
components of content – not just the complete
documents – allows organizations much more
granular control and helps them deliver the right
information, to the right people, in the right lan-
guage, at the right time, and in the right format.
So, effective content management is really about
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managing all of the pieces of content (or com-
ponents) that are used to assemble documents.
Those documents can be physical documents
– like printed user manuals – , or virtual docu-
ments – like web pages or information delivered
to a mobile device.
Eliminating expenses
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 pri-
mary 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.
Technical documentation departments can learn
a lot from industries that have spent decades col-
lecting and analyzing process information, indus-
tries like the US fast food industry. The fast food
restaurant McDonald’s has earned four billion
dollars from operations the past three years. The
success of McDonald’s was built on collecting
information on its processes and finding ways to
slash as little as six seconds from the time it takes
to order and receive your food. A McDonald’s
manager is far more likely to know the details
about his or her store than a tech doc, training, or
collaboration
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.
The effective manager
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 with-
out tools to collect those metrics? In organiza-
tions that value content as an asset, managers are
provided with relevant training and the requisite
tools needed to effectively manage their depart-
ments and the products they create. You won’t
see managers in these organizations using an Ex-
cel 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 us-
ing 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.
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
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03.09.2007 13:36:25 Uhr
 collaboration
heading, how long they’ve been flying, how
much time remains before their journey is com-
plete, etc. No pilot – nor any passenger, for that
matter – would accept anything less. What tech-
nical 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 have
been approved, how many are being translated,
and how much it costs to perform all these
tasks. These metrics, and others, can be captured
automatically by content management systems
that include tools designed to provide manag-
ers 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 and efficient manner.
Good enough is not
sufficient
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.The
spreadsheet/white board approach used in many
technical documentation departments relies
on human beings to collect and manage data.
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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.
Keeping an overview
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 man-
age 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 interpreta-
tions 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 exam-
ple, if writers worked hard to meet a deadline and
get content in the system for review, and review-
ers 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 go-
ing on with important documentation projects
instead of guessing or asking all the time.
Managing content creation and delivery is a com-
plex and interdependent process. The absence
of one person in the 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 docu-
mentation and reduces the chances that your
documentation products will become back-end-
loaded and cause delays in important product
launches. No department wants to be the one
that delays a new product launch and cause the
company money losses in that way.
contact
Scott Abel is a content
management strategist
and structured content
evangelist. His website
is a resource for techni-
cal writers interested in
content management.
Scott is also a founding member of Content
Management Professionals.
TheContentWrangler.com
scottabel@mac.com
Diane Wieland is a
technology journalist
who works in Indiana-
polis.
dmwiel@comcast.net.
SEPTEMBER 2007
03.09.2007 13:36:27 Uhr