A Content Analysis Snapshot

A company may find that their documentation is not keeping pace to meet the needs of their end-users, or that the cost of developing and maintaining the documentation is becoming an issue as the company grows. Such companies often need outside assistance from an experienced firm with the technical expertise to look at their specific needs and formulate a corporate blueprint for developing and managing content.
Contiem’s Consulting Services group works with our Clients to develop an in-depth understanding of each organization’s needs and pain points. We then analyze the tools and processes currently in place to develop and maintain content. This allows us to develop recommendations which, working with company management, are then used to develop a long-term content strategy, essentially a blueprint to effect the changes.

One Client’s Objectives

A company that manufactures complex, highly customized, software-intensive products approached Contiem about its need to significantly improve how product documentation was developed and delivered.
The company was spending considerable time and money developing, printing, and distributing product manuals, yet they struggled to keep the documentation current with ongoing product releases. Users of the documentation complained that, in a number of ways, the manuals were not meeting their needs. The company knew they needed to move their documentation online to solve some of their challenges, but had no path for accomplishing this. All the while, the costs associated with supporting product documentation were continuing to increase including adding additional staff and contractors.
Having struggled with these issues for an extended period of time, they contacted Contiem for assistance, identifying three key business goals for product documentation:

• Be more accessible to customers and team members; printed manuals, hundreds of pages long, were not meeting the needs of either customers or the company’s own service and support personnel.
• Shorten the time required to develop and update the documentation to get it current with the latest software and hardware releases.
• Reduce the costs associated with developing and updating content.

The Contiem Approach

While every engagement is unique based upon a company’s specific needs, Contiem has an established process for gaining the in-depth knowledge needed to develop content-strategic recommendations. These recommendations formulate the blueprint that will assist companies in achieving their documentation goals.

Establish the Baseline

• Requirements for the Audience and Document Deliverables – Contiem interviewed those groups that ‘touched’ the product documentation: Engineering, Software QA, Product Management, Marketing, IT, Field Service, Customer Support, and the Product Documentation team. This allowed us to identify the needs of each group as well as their current pain points.
• Content Analysis – Contiem then did a ‘deep-dive’ on a subset of the current product documentation which allowed us to determine if the documents were fulfilling the needs of the end-users and, if not, identify the specific shortcomings.
• Documentation Development Process – Contiem examined how content was developed: the tools that were used, the processes for tracking and reviewing content, and how documentation fit into the processes used by other parts of the business.
• Documentation Delivery Format – Contiem uncovered how content (e.g., documents, updates) was made available to the various users (e.g., field engineers, customers).

Through this process, the Contiem team acquired in-depth knowledge of the current needs, processes, and pain points which provided a baseline to begin the process of developing recommendations for effecting the required improvements.

Identify the Core Issues

The Contiem experts rely on years of experience and best practices to sift through the baseline data and distill a list of the core issues. In this case, the key findings were:

• The manuals were very detailed and complete, but, at hundreds of pages, were too long; users had difficulty finding the specific information that they were looking for.
• There was too much introductory and explanatory information about the product that nobody used; this increased the cost of developing, printing, and maintaining the manuals.
• There were a number of features and sections that users rarely required; users were not reading the manual. Most customers were calling Customer Support when they had a problem.
• When the customers received onsite training, the trainer did not use the manual, so the customer was not familiar with locating information within the manual.
• There were a number of issues related to the processes being used by the product documentation team:
  • Due to the tools and templates currently in use, considerable time was spent formatting the documents.
  • There was no strategy for reusing repetitive content among the different documents or between products in a family.
  • The processes were not aligned with the Agile process being used by the Software Engineering team.
  • There was no process for managing the various priorities and requests that the Product Documentation team received, and there was no resource planning taking place.

Develop Recommendations

After the in-depth analysis, Contiem developed a comprehensive set of recommendations for driving efficiencies and achieving the company’s top objectives. The Contiem team leveraged their experience working with a wide variety of companies, applying best practices, and knowing what will drive the requisite unit cost improvements (e.g., cost per page). At a high level, the key recommendations were to:

• Reduce the amount of content being developed and maintained; rarely used documents should be archived or eliminated.
• Reduce the amount of content being printed; printed content should be in the form of checklists. The more detailed content — which will be used much less frequently — should be made available online.
• Accelerate the use of DITA, which will allow content to be more easily reused while reducing the time/cost associated with updating content. DITA will also greatly reduce the time being spent formatting the printed manuals.
• Move documentation to HTML and web-based delivery, creating separate sites for customers and company support groups. (Note that for both the move to DITA and HTML and web-based delivery, Contiem provided specific recommendations for tools, processes, and priorities.)
• Implement a comprehensive structure for managing the priorities and workload of the product documentation team; align that structure with the current Agile-based process being used by Software Engineering.

Contiem presented its recommendations to the company’s management team and conducted several review sessions, discussing the recommendations and the implementation path. After making adjustments, Contiem delivered a final report and implementation plan, starting work shortly thereafter.
By implementing these approved recommendations, Contiem forecasted yearly savings of over 110%. 20% of the reduced costs came from print reduction, and other savings are direct and indirect results of creating efficiencies. The process improvements reduced the amount of customer support calls, eliminated the use of additional contractors, and used the company’s subject matter experts much more efficiently. Beyond cash flow, the company will be improving customers’ perceptions, making content available more quickly, and spending less management time on documentation.
Contiem is in the business of easing our Clients’ content challenges. The Contiem Consulting Services team is uniquely skilled at uncovering opportunities for improvement and providing their implementation blueprint. If you believe the way your documentation is developed, organized, synchronized, translated, delivered, or maintained has room for improvement, Contiem will work with you to tailor a solution for your specific needs. You can follow the implementation blueprint with in-house resources or choose Contiem as your complete content partner.

About Contiem

Contiem has been the trusted content partner of choice for companies and organizations such as American Express, the U.S. Federal Government, The Home Depot, Cisco Systems, UnitedHealthcare, eBay, Facebook, and many more. When you engage Contiem, we take the time to listen and develop an in-depth understanding of your immediate needs and longer-term challenges. Then, leveraging the capabilities that make us unique, we will provide a best-in-class, client-focused solution designed to achieve your business goals.
Experienced in a host of authoring software and with a wide variety of industries, we specialize in delivering a blend of services for documenting products and processes, training development, translation and localization, and content management. Whether you need a complete training program to augment a new product or service, or you require job aids for internal learning, Contiem has the experience and skills to deliver the results you are looking for.