While I’ve spent my career in the software/consumer electronic world, I’ve done a little in the regulated industries. My favorite was working for a company that reported to the Federal Railroad Administration.

How is a regulated environment different?

It’s different in a number of ways, depending on who is regulating you.

For example, you may be lightly regulated, as the rail equipment company I worked for was. By this, I mean that you have to track things like the big edit reviews and resulting comments and all previously released product documentation. Design specs after a certain point had to be auditable, as did factory floor policies and procedures. As did training materials used to teach people how to use the products.

Fundamentally, anything that was required to show auditors how the product and the product instructions got be the the thing out in the field has to be tracked. And, because this equipment was very robust, they had to track it essentially forever, as the products worked in the field for at least 50 years.

If a railroad crossing failed and people or property were damaged, the company had to be able to show the documents that shipped with the products, how that information came to be in the manuals, how the equipment was made, and how the end users were trained to use the equipment. For as long as that equipment was functioning in the field.

They had a lot of paper in a lot of file cabinets.

What they all have in common

Regardless of the industry – FDA, Financial, SOX, Solvency II, other government – it comes down to audit trails. You have to be able to show the trail of content that got you to the place you are right now. And that means history of content development in some manner.

If you’re using Word or InDesign, you have to depend on an external document management system and somehow track when and how the changes came to be.You must track versions of what shipped and when to who and why. You have to track review comments.

You wind up with a lot of paper in a lot of filing cabinets.

There are better ways

There is another way – you can track and manage the components in your content. Using the right component content management tool, you can use the history features to show you this information. You can also manage your review comments electronically. It’s a lot easier than trying to manage all these parts on your own.

To see how Author-it manages history and audit trails, watch the movie below.

Have you worked in a regulated environment? What were the restrictions you faced?

Long ago, when I owned my own technical writing outsource company, we hired a writer for a project. She reported to my project lead, who wanted to tear his hair out after the first month.

She couldn’t estimate how much work was left. She also couldn’t estimate how much she had done. We had no idea if she was on track or not.

This drove us crazy, as we had a content spec for the project and her topics were clearly assigned. We also had a hard deadline. But for some reason, she was at a loss to estimate how many topics remained before she was done. She was a great writer but this was surprising. How do you not know where you are in a project? How do you know you’re on track for the deadline?

Release states help you

The thing I like about release states is they help you see at a glance what content is in what state. If we had used Author-it with release states, we could have asked her to count the number of topics that had been moved to review and subtract that from the topics NOT in review yet to get a sense of where we were in the project.

And they’re customizable, so you don’t have to try to fit your specific content flow needs into what we thought they should be. Release states support your workflow the way you need your workflow to run. Release states are easy to set up and easy to use.

To learn more about how this works, watch this 5 minute video from our free Learning Center.

I’ve been thinking about the use of social media and technology recently. We’ve known for years that people want the information they need to get on with things, whether it’s installing the new Blue-ray player or completing the vacation form for work. No one wants to read an 80 page document, complete with cross references and footnotes. Life is short and full of other things.

Alan Pringle (one of my personal heroes) has a new blog post that caught my eye. His main point is that “good” writing, for our users, may be indistinguishable from “good enough” writing. And I think I’m agreeing with him.

Close enough may be good enough

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was old enough to understand that actual people wrote the stories I loved reading. I married a writer. I teach writing. I read like a crazy person. I write creative non-fiction. I’m very pro lovely prose.

But, do our users care that we labored over that paragraph for 3 weeks to make sure it read beautifully? I’m thinking not. Especially now that social media really is opening up ways for users to support each other.

For example, I bought a wireless repeater for my home network a few years ago. Because this is a 60 year old house, while it’s not giant, it has some challenges. Including walls full of metal piping and odd corners and areas that I’d like internet availability. I’d like to sit on my patio in the spring and fall and work on my computer.

The instructions for setting up the repeater didn’t work. Just flat didn’t work. I did an internet search, thinking I could not be the only person with this issue. Sure enough, someone posted on a list how to actually install this repeater. And the steps worked.

Were the user-provided instructions lovely and complete? No. Were they good enough for me to figure out the rest? Yes. I was up and running in less than 30 minutes. The informal instructions were good enough.

So what now, if we’re not the Keepers of the Well Written Information?

In the world of professional writing, the writing part is really a small subset of what we do. We design information, analyze audience, organize content, and anticipate user needs, to name a few. Clear writing is important but it’s not important enough to define what we do.

When I teach Introduction to Tech Comm, I teach a lot about a third writing, a third managing your projects, and a third “this is what we do all day”. So, clearly decent writing is important.

But if you can’t deliver on deadline, the writing doesn’t matter that much. If you deliver incomprehensible writing on deadline, it also doesn’t matter much. There is a middle area that’s the sweet spot for all of us.

Including our users.