Shape of a Modern Technical Publications Organization
Presented to the STC Silicon Valley chapter on April 18, 2016
Description:
Modern writing organizations need skills very different from basic writing. This session will cover the job roles and skills that your organization might need to adopt best practices. For example: content strategy, analytics, web and app development, taxonomist, linguists, etc, and how can you best incorporate these new skills and roles to partner with your writing team.
About Sanborn Hodgkins
Sanborn Hodgkins manages a cloud management writing team at VMware, Inc. and is especially interested in developing resources for the customer’s full information experience. She has worked as a technical editor and writer at companies such as Apple, Adobe, and Google, but she also has been on the other side of the fence managing QA teams, including a stint as a QA Director at Netscape.
More information: http://www.stc-siliconvalley.org/2016/03/20/shape-of-a-modern-tech-pubs-org/
17. • Database
• SQL
• Visualization
software
Skills
Required
• Content volume
• Info type
assessment
• Writer/Editor output
• Release readiness
Value
18.
19.
20.
21. Distribution of Writing Services Staff
Tools
Tools
Developers
20%
IA
18%
Editing Editing Editing
Production Production
Tools
Developer
Video
IAIA
Test
Pre-XML XML/CMS 2015
Consider bringing in a graphic or UI designer. First impressions matter. The way customer perceive your information could matter more than the actual information you provide.
Information architecture is one of the more critical job roles you see in writing organizations. As we increase the scope and complexity of content and need to simplify the user experience, IAs become more important.
At VMware, we have two levels of IAs. The first level is dedicated information architects who are responsible for structuring the authoring experience and the toolchain.
Writers within product teams serve an IA role by helping to structure the content, navigation, and metadata for their content areas. We use tools such as the Information Architecture Workbench to prototype and design new content structures.
At VMware, one significant investment we made was to develop a video program and hire a producer. The initial idea was to produce more visually appealing content, but we have since worked with the video producer to shoot internal promotion pieces, customer interviews, and prototype new ways of engaging with customers.
One job role or skill that is now essential is an content strategist who can help you to understand your existing content. What is it that you have? How much information? What types of information? This kind of audit or inventory can help you to draw a baseline and to identify gaps.
Customer engagement was traditionally a program management job with marketing. However, CSAT is now a critical part of understanding if our writing, IA, and content strategy efforts are effective.
Hiring a program manager that is focused on customer satisfaction, engagement, and outreach programs could be the best pipeline for determining your impact to the business. This role requires understand of CSAT, NPS, survey structure, and program management.
It’s critical to understand who your audience is and how the interact with your content. Writing organizations are increasingly using analytics to help determine the access, usage, and effectiveness of content. Hiring, training, and dedicating resource to analytics can have strategic value.
At VMware, we use a combination of standard analytics (Google Analytics) and customer reports to help us understand how customers use our information.
Analytics can help you determine:
Where customer confusion is so you can promote content that answers questions
Which devices customers access your information so you can optimize your deployment
Which search terms customers are using so you can understand focus areas as they trend
Which areas customers don’t access so you can shift resource to more critical areas
But analytics can quickly become complicated when you move beyond the dashboard. Some questions can only be answered by correlating data from multiple reports or structuring a data warehouse to run more comprehensive queries.
You might need web or program developers to work on in-house projects or tools that are essential to your business. When projects from technical writing organizations are prioritized alongside marketing, core IT, or engineering teams it sometimes means that are our efforts are not fully staffed or supported. Hiring a developer for your own team might help to bridge that gap or give you the independence to be effective on your own timeline.
At VMware we build many of our own tools that help improve efficiencies by introducing automation or simplifying front-end authoring. This example is of our product names database.
Where are you headed? What are the skills you need to grow in the team or hire to achieve your vision.
As you work to change and build your staff, be sure to track the ration of writers to the team members that support the entire department. Monitoring their capability and efficiency as you track your success can help to determine if the changes are helping to achieve your goals and can help you to justify additional headcount.
Hiring plans for VMware as we adopt more strategic roles.
Evaluate your current staff. What roles and skills do they have?
Where is you want to be in 2-4 years? What skills will you need to get there?
What do customers say you could improve on?
What do you team members say are their pain points?
What is your vision statement/mission? What is necessary to help you deliver on that mission?
Manage cultural change.
Discuss changes with stakeholder teams.
Prepare to justify experimentation to upper management.
Start now.
