Paul Trotter, Founder and CEO at Author-it Software Corporation

To succeed, business decision makers need to be open to new ideas, while at the same time appreciating that standard processes are standard for a reason: they work. It’s a fine balance, and understanding when to look and when to leap can be the difference between growth and stagnation.

In my Death of the Document article, I talked a bit about accounting software and the way it’s evolved from the clunky spreadsheets imitating the old written ledgers to the clever SaaS software that lets users just put in their data and get out what they need. I argued that it’s time for authoring software to evolve in the same way – that there’s no reason producing a document shouldn’t be just as easy as producing a set of accounts. It’s a new way of looking at authoring software.

With new ways of looking at things, you inevitably get resistance.

Say you’re in business, and you have a problem you need to solve. What do you do? You get four people to come into your office and pitch you their ideas for how they can solve your problem. Three of them say they’re going to solve your problem one way, offering different flavors of exactly the same solution. The fourth says he’ll solve your problem a different way, with a completely unique, novel approach that looks at the underlying issues from a completely new perspective.

It’s pretty natural to want to choose one of the three. People fear the unknown, and when the boss looks back if something goes wrong, he or she isn’t going to question why you went with the safe option and not the risky one. You did it because it was safe, and safe is meant to be good. After all, it took more than a decade for the closed-innovation phrase “no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft”.

Of course, none of this is to say that if people come to you with a crazy idea they say will set your business apart from your competition, you should start writing out a check on the spot. Some ideas are unsuitable for certain businesses, some are unsuitable for certain times or locations, and – let’s be honest – some are just unsuitable.

So how can you make decisions when the choice is a leap? I was walking past a cafe the other day and I saw a sign that said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. It made me think about innovation and how businesses can improve the odds when it comes to implementing new ideas. I realized imagination isn’t more important than knowledge, and neither is knowledge more important than imagination. Like a gun and a bullet, imagination and knowledge are interdependent – extremely powerful when used together, but entirely useless on their own.

When someone comes to you with a radical idea, you need to listen to it objectively, without dismissing it out of hand because it sways too far from the norm, but also without getting so caught up in the potential that you forget the practicalities. Then you need to think about it, applying your knowledge of the market and of your business. It sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how many people consult with their hearts and their guts, but not with their heads.

If necessary, ask the person to explain the benefits again, and confront him or her with any concerns. The individual who truly has a great product idea will love it – it’s like asking a bodybuilder to pump his guns.

It all sounds like a lot of work, but it’s the difference between a great company and one that just gets by. And when you hit on the innovation that’s not only exciting and fresh, but that it also makes sense when you stop and think about it, you’ll know you’re onto a winner.

Author-it Software Corporation – 3031 Tisch Way, Suite 500 – San Jose, CA 95128

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.

If you are interested in a great conference, I strongly recommend the India STC conference in December. I’ve not been (yet), but hope to at some point. Apparently, the energy of the conference is amazing.

From their email

The 13th Annual Conference of the STC India Chapter will be held in Chennai on December 1, 2, and 3, 2011. Please send us a proposal with an abstract of about 250 words. Request you to include information about your profile in the proposal. If you have experience presenting at conferences, including STC, mention that in the profile. The best of the paper proposals stands a chance of winning a prize!

For information about paper proposal categories, visit: http://www.stc-india.org/conferences/2011/?page_id=18

Mail your proposal in .DOC, .TXT, or .PDF format to conferences@stc-india.org on or before August 5, 2011.

For more information regarding sponsorships and conference, drop a line to Saravanan Manoharan: treasurer@stc-india.org.

We look forward to meeting you at the Chennai conference.

Sometimes my personal life and my Author-it professional life collide. It feels like this is happening this week. The two stories are related – just stay with me on this.

Personal life first

We have owned a Leonberger dog for the last 2+ years, originally gotten to keep the Aussie company and be his best friend. She was about 6 months old when we got her and for about 18 months, all was well in my house. The dogs played together and liked each other very much.

And then something happened.

We don’t know why but the Leonberger no longer likes the Aussie and attacks him given half a chance. This has resulted in several massive scary dog fights. Because combined, they weigh more than I do, the fights were also hard to stop. And someone is going to get badly hurt.

So we hired the trainer we’ve worked with before and did everything she suggested – kept them separate, encouraged happy interactions, etc. All of it. Right down the line. We love these dogs and want to help them be friends again.

Seven months later, it’s not working. The Leo doesn’t like the Aussie. Period. The Leo likes other dogs very much but not the Aussie. The trainer says it’s personal. And personal means we are very limited with what we can do.

After thinking about what’s best for both dogs, we’ve come to the devastating conclusion that one of them has to find a new home. Because we had the Aussie first and because he has health issues, we decided to keep him and turn the Leo over to the local Leonberger Rescue.

The hand-over happens this weekend. There is a lot of sadness and crying in our house. But it’s the right decision, regardless of what we want or how much we love the dog. And we do love her.

Professional life

In the world of content development, we acquire tools and then often fall in love with them. Which is fine – it’s a happy place to love the tools you work with day in and day out.

But sometimes, the situation changes. Perhaps we discover the tool we love very much is not scalable and we’re growing. Perhaps we need a new output format and it’s really hard to get it, using this tool.

Things can change over time.

A new tool may be needed, But it’s hard because you really like the tool you have and it was such a good fit until things changed. You almost feel like a bad tool owner by changing tools.

But a smart professional understands the limits of what they are doing and recognizes sometimes you really do need to get new tools. It’s in the best interest of your content and your users to do so. It’s a hard decision to make but it’s the right decision in the end.

To help you make the decision, you may hire a consultant to advise you. If you do so, take them seriously. If you thought enough of them to hire them, then pay attention to what they recommend.

Why are these stories related?

In the end, you have to make decisions that are best for the situation, which may be very different than what you want.

I want my Leonberger to be best friends again with my Aussie. But that’s not going to happen, in the very experienced opinion of my trusted trainer (my consultant). As a result, both dogs are stressed and potentially I or the dogs are going to be badly hurt.

You may want your tool to work for your group after you add 10 more people. But if the tool was never designed for what you need now, then it’s the wrong tool. You can pretend this is all going to be OK or you can face the facts and make the right decisions.

It’s up to you.

I recently posted about how much I like Variants in the new version. I thought I’d take a few minutes and point out another thing I like about Author-it, although it’s not new in 5.5.

I like that I can swap out a static graphic for an AVI video when I go to online publishing.  This lets me support my users appropriately for the output without any manual effort. I set it up and forget it. The more that can happen automatically, the more time we have to add value to our content instead of fussing with our tools.

Here’s how

You may need to create a new template for this kind of object before you start. If you need help doing this, refer to the online help in Author-it.

1. Add a graphic to your library or select an existing graphic. Open the Graphic Properties dialog box.
2. On the General tab, select the template you want to use. Make sure you select one that has both Print and Web selected in the Include Object In area AND has the video play options you want for the Web output.
3. On the Print tab, select the graphic you want to use in the print output.
   
4. On the Web tab, browse and select the avi file you want to use.
   
5. Click Apply and then click OK.
6. If you haven’t already, place the graphic object in a topic.
7. Publish each output and test.

See why I like it?

Regardless of what you exactly do in the field of creating or producing information, you spend time developing content. For most of us, that means writing but some of you do screen videos, or make illustrations.

I’ve come to realize in the last 2 or so years, we need to stop calling this writing, or drawing, or what ever and refer to this process as “developing content”.  And I have some good reasons.

Developing content

There is the thought out in the business world that “anyone can write – we were all taught in school how to do it.” And that’s a silly idea. In school, we were given the tools and shown how to use them.

• We got a hammer and learned to pound on things.
• We got a screwdriver and learned to turn things.
• We got a wrench and learned how to wrench things.

But very few of us left school knowing how to build things. So why does the business world think we all did? For some reason, the business world thinks that all you needed was an introduction to the tools and you’ve got the skill.

They don’t think that about managing their financial books. We all can basically manage a household budget but probably none of us are suited to be a CFO.

Writing is a skill and a gift

Most of us professional writers started with a gift and spent a long time learning our craft. We improve and improve to the end of our lives.

Much like a carpenter (to continue my metaphor) who starts with a gift and learns more and more over the course of his or her life. The work of a master craftsperson is breath-taking in its beauty.

So, if the business world thinks that what we do is essentially unskilled apprentice labor and that anyone can do it, we need to reframe the discussion.

Developers make stuff

My reasoning for content development is that developers make stuff. Perhaps in your company, they develop code.

We make stuff, too. And our stuff is as important and needed as the code is. After all, if you can’t use the product, what good is it?

Therefore, we’re content developers. We develop content, regardless of writing, illustrating, or anything else we’re creating to support people in what they are doing.

Try it out

Try it out in your workplace. Start quietly calling what you do “developing content”. Don’t make a company announcement or anything. Just start using the phrase. I bet in 6 months, it’ll come back to you from someone else.

Do you agree there is value or do you think this is silly semantics?

I’ve been training customers the last few weeks and so not as able to keep up on the blog as I would like. But, being in Author-it every day, showing various ways to make your workflow easier made me think a post with some of that might be interesting.

Feel free to add your own favorite things in the comments.

Variants in 5.5

We’ve had variants for some time. But the “fall back” feature is one I like a lot. Here’s how it works.

In Author-it Adminstrator, you need to either create a new variant or modify an existing one, depending of what you need to do. We’re going to look at an existing one – it’s called Version. Click the picture and then click it again to see it large.

The important thing here is the Browse button next to the Value list.

By clicking the Add button, I added various versions of the product to my library. I organized them in a hierarchy by using the green arrows in the upper left of the dialog box.

So, what does all this mean? It means that as I create new content I can assign a variant to the content. So, for example, I have an overview of the product. I wrote it for V2, but it  hasn’t changed in any of the versions since then.

But as I add content for the different version over time, I can assign different variant values to that content. Perhaps we did a bug fix/special version for a company and called it V2.1a.  For that version, we added some new content and marked it as V2.1a. All the content for V2.1 is in this book, plus the V2.1a content. But some of this content, we’ve not updated since V2.0 and don’t need to update – it’s all still accurate.

In other words, in one book, we have topics with a mix of versions assigned to them, using the variants.

So, maybe we’d like to publish the V2.1a book but we’d like to see what content goes in that version before we publish.

In Author-it Editor, we open the book. At the bottom of the list of topics in the book is the “Filter contents using variant criteria” list. If we click on that, we see a list of the available criteria and we can select one or more.

So, for example (click the picture and then click it again to see it large.):

What we see is just the content that is marked V2.1a and any content that appears in the fallback path, if there is no content marked V2.1a and any content that doesn’t have that variant criteria applied at all.

To make life even more interesting, I have another variant I call ShCountry. Because, in my example, we also now send similar but slightly different content depending on the country it’s going to. You can see that I selected Australia as the ShCountry variant and the ProductVersion as V1, You can see the topic marked with the V2 variant is lined thru. This means that topic will not appear in this output, if I select these variant criteria for publishing my book.

Because I can select to apply and select multiple variant criteria for my content, I can use one master book and then filter, based on the variants I select to meet my customer and product needs.

In conclusion

Well, I promised you several and gave you one favorite thing. The next blog post will be more favorite things. Promise.

We are in the business of getting people the information they need and letting them get back to their life. Fundamentally, that’s what we do, whether we write user manuals, policies and procedures, create illustrations, videos, or any other thing.

And in this information rich world, this is an important thing to do.

No one reads the manuals

If I had a US dollar for every time I’ve heard “No one reads the manuals” I’d be retired in the tropics, playing with large dogs and writing crazy stories. While no one reads the instructions is a true statement, it’s a false statement.

People do read the instructions we provide. They do. But not like a novel – when was the last time you read your employers Policies and Procedures guide, start to finish? Probably never. It’s not that interesting.

But you may have read a part of it in the last month – perhaps when you completed your expense report for attending the STC Summit conference. Because you couldn’t remember what the per diem was and how to charge that properly. Because you don’t fill out expense reports often, you needed to be reminded of how to properly do that task. So you could get on with your life.

And that’s how it works

This is how our instructions are used – on demand. People rarely read our instructions from beginning to end, to see how it all turns out. Typically, people read what they need to know right now and then move on.

Perhaps they need to refresh their memory about how to run the month-end report, or how to rewire the speaker wiring for the home theater system the 3 year old gleefully pulled out. or they need to create an expense report.

So how can we help?

We can create short, to the point instructions for these user moments. I call them Job Aids, you may call them something else. But they are short overview instructions for important infrequent tasks.

Installation is a good job aid – typically called Getting Started guides. For most things, you install one time and then never again. You probably don’t reinstall your garage door opener – after it’s complete, you can happily throw away those instructions.

Other tasks that make good job aids are running end of month and end of year reporting. Not done often enough to remember exactly how to do it so a refresher is helpful. You probably don’t need to include how to run a report, because reports may be run at the end of every day. How to set up the end of year report and archive the data is similar but different.

Make them available to your users

OK, so if my users only need these infrequently, how do I get that information to them, you may be asking yourself.

You can ship them with the product, if you know ahead of time what is needed. But most of us don’t have the luxury of knowing ahead of time.

If you talk to your support people, they can give you ideas. Many of the questions they get are actually Job Aid questions. So talk to your support people and see if they get the same sorts of questions.

Then develop the job aid. Try to keep it to one sheet of paper, front and back.

Now you can post the job aid in the support area of your website. Ask support to tell callers about them. If you send a marketing thing to your users every month or so, include links to the newest job aids to get people to know they are there.

Job aids can impact the company’s bottom line

Consider tracking statistics to see how often the job aids are looked at/downloaded and if those sorts of questions are being asked less often in Support. That’s how you know you’re being effective. Take those numbers to management as clear evidence the docs group is making a bottom line impact on the business.

Clearly someone is reading them, you can say. As a matter of fact, this month, X people read them. And Y people didn’t call support to ask about that topic, as compared to 6 months ago.