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.

One of the things I love about being in the high tech industry is the learning never stops. I’ve always thought having a job where you do the exact same thing every day sounds terrifically boring. And in the high tech industry, that really doesn’t happen – every day brings something new.

Training

We’ve added training to my list of things I’m doing and I couldn’t be happier. I love teaching people. I’m so passionate about this industry and what we do. I get to now also help people by providing them the tools to learn Author-it. Then, after the training, they are going to do wonderful things with that knowledge and change the world.

And I get to be a small part of that. Wonderful.

Towards that end, we’re doing several things at Author-it, short term and longer term.

Online training is free

In case you’ve not heard, we’ve made all the materials for our Core training available in small nuggets and it’s all free. If you have 10 or so minutes, you can watch a video specifically about what you want to review and then get on with your day.

This is a Big Deal.

If you want to add to your skillset and learn Author-it, you can do that with the Learning Center and an evaluation copy of Author-it. If you want to brush up on something – perhaps your company has finally decided to do online help – you can refresh your knowledge in the Learning Center.

Did I mention it’s free?

Already popular

Based on the stats, this resource is incredibly popular already. If you’ve not been to the Learning Center, I strongly recommend you get over there and check things out.

This has been a very busy week for the technical content world.

Author-it 5.5 is released

As you know by now, we released the latest version of Author-it 5.5 to great excitement in the industry. Once again, we’ve redefined the possible in the content authoring and managing world. For more details about what this release includes, click here and then sign up for the free webinar that shows you how the Author-it Reviewer works.

June 1st at 2pm Pacific. As always, if the time or date don’t work for you, sign up anyway to get a link to the recording the next day.

This hour long webinar is a don’t-miss event. We strongly recommend inviting your boss as well. S/he’s going to want to see this. Author-it Reviewer is changing collaborative work forever.

Author-it Learning Center

If you’ve been interested in learning Author-it, we have an option you’re going to love: free, on-demand training.

The Author-it Learning Center includes videos to help you understand the basics of Author-it. You learn what objects are, how to import and author content, and how to customize your outputs.

It’s all online, ready for you to view when you’re ready to learn. Each session is under 15 minutes, making is easy to find the time to learn something new.

Even if you know Author-it, it’s a great way to refresh your skills or review something you may have forgotten. What a great way to get the information you need and move on with your day.

The STC Summit Conference

And finally, this week was the STC Summit Conference. We want to thank the many many people who came by the Author-it booth to find out how our products can make life easier.

150 people wore Author-it tee shirts for the special Apple iPad give away. We talked until we had no voice, gave out chocolate Kiwi Fish, and awarded the iPad to Andrea Wenger.

A great time was had by all, as you can see in the picture below.

I was away last week at a client site, working with them on how to move to Author-it. They bought Author-it because they see the benefits, but, like a lot of companies who are looking to improve their workflow, they didn’t really know where to start. What would be Best Practices for them? How to get there fast so as to not interrupt the current deadlines?

They also wanted to use this move to better architect their content so they got more value out of what they have.

And so we started

We started with looking at the content they had and how they currently use it. They sell large industrial machines that are sold either 1) “as built” with no customizations, or 2) somewhat to extremely customized. They don’t do online help, so we just looked at producing PDFs. Of course, if they need to someday move to help, that’s super easy for them.

They had been doing docs in InDesign and Ventura and had to copy, save, edit, and rebuild every time a customer wanted a manual 2 type. This process took 1 to 3 days, not counting any new content development or any review time.

What they wanted to know was how to go about this process in Author-it. We walked through how to build a book and  then use variants to create the custom books. They got very excited that the 3 days of production would be reduced to less than a day.

Importing existing content

Then we started importing content from Ventura and InDesign to see what that was going to involve. It’s one thing to get new tools to improve your workflow, but if getting the content into the new tool is hard or impossible, that’s something else entirely.

The good news is that getting the content in from Ventura turned out to be super easy – we had the profile set up in under an hour. This is in large part because the docs staff had stuck to a short list of paragraph formats and didn’t play fast and loose. One of the advantages to a team that has been in place for many years is this sort of rigorous adherence to the templates.

The InDesign docs, however, are a different story. People in and outside the docs group created the InDesign docs. The adherence to the template was, well, less strict. We got the basic profile created pretty quickly, but there is going to be some pre-import work needed to put all the text in InDesign into one flow, instead of the adhoc flows it is in now, for example.

Changes to the workflow

Then we started looking at the workflow issues they needed to change to make this all work. The specific details for them are not important to us here, but the big picture is.

They needed to review how they:

• Import existing content – release states to know what’s been roughly imported, reviewed after import, ready to start publishing, and so on
• Develop content – what is truly new content and what should be reused, where to put content, how to know it’s ready for reviews
• Manage existing content – version, variants, release states, and so on
• Structure and locations of graphics folders- where to put overall graphics, product line graphics, one-off graphics, and so on
• Reuse content – what can be reused vs what is currently being reused, where to put reused content, how to name it, and so on
• Review content – how do they send out just the content that actually needs to be reviewed vs all the content in a manual, and more
• Manage localized content – they don’t do a lot but when they need to they need to right now
• Archive content and understand the history – what topics shipped in what manuals when? When was that topic changed and to what?

In sum

Even if you’re not thinking about moving to Author-it, these are all issues you must face when you move from one tool to another. You certainly can just start dumping your existing content into the new tool, but I think that many of the problems you had with the old tool are still going to be problems in the new one.

It takes planning and work to get the benefits of moving to a tool better suited to the problems you’re trying to solve.

I applaud this client for thinking this through and planning the change. It shows real maturity and that the CEO understands the value of their content.

I was really excited to work with this group and know they will be successful.

A visual

I’m including a photo I took the one warm-ish day I was there. My hotel was right on the Spokane River. One day was sunny and I took a long walk along the river to clear my head after a full day of intensive work. It was great. Being a So Cal girl, I don’t see many rivers. Ones with water, anyway.

(The client was not Kaiser Aluminum, I just liked the lovely river area with the Kaiser plant above the river.)

This is a short post, as I’m getting ready to visit with a client next week and need to wrap up projects before I do that. It’s been a rather frantic week.

But if you’re in Spokane, Washington and want to have evening drinks, send contact me and we’ll make a date.

Good news 1

Two new books are coming out about Author-it! I have specific information about the first book now and will share more about the second book in a week or two.

Learning Author-it by Char James-Tanny from XML Press is available this month. Char is a long time user of Author-it, Author-it consultant, and an all around smart person so this book should be very helpful as a reference to learning and using Author-it. I’ve not seen a copy yet, but we’re all very excited about this book.

Good news 2

This week, Paul Trotter gave a free webinar about his vision of the future of content development. We had nearly 300 people sign up, despite the day being Easter Monday holiday for much of the world. We knew the day might not be the best, but with Paul’s travel schedule, it was the only day we could get his attention for an hour.

If you missed this interesting webinar, click here to view the recording.

Lastly

I really hope to see you at the STC Summit in 2 weeks or so. We’ll have New Zealand chocolate fish to give out Monday and Tuesday, as well as interesting and informative activities in the booth.

Don’t forget the special Facebook giveaway – go to our Facebook page (Author-it) and “Like” the page to be entered into a special drawing. We have something very Kiwi to give away to the winner. You don’t have to be at the STC Summit to win.

I was talking to a friend whose employer has merged with another company. My friend’s company spent the last 5 years clawing its way to supportable and repeatable processes throughout the company as they build software products. If you are familiar with the 5 levels of the Capability Maturity Model, they had finally reached something close to a level 4.

It was hard and they struggled but development, testing, and documentation had stable processes that supported consistently developing products.

Then the merger happened.

Post merger

As they bring the 2 companies together, they are also breaking the company into 2 parts, based on markets. The split is not based on previous company affiliation, but rather on the needs of each vertical market both companies sell into. It makes sense to break it up this way, because the products are related but the needs of each vertical are very different.

This could all be very good, except for one thing: the company they merged with has no actual product development processes.

And that could all work if Company A (my friend’s employer) consumed Company B. But that’s not what’s happening. As they break the companies apart and regroup into 2 separate business units, the processes of each company are staying in place. Those people who are moving into the business unit that was Company A get the existing and stable processes of Company A. Those who are moving into the business unit of what was Company B get all the processes of Company B, which is to say, none.

6 levels of the CMM

My friend and I have thought for years there are actually 6 levels of the CMM. We both discovered this level when we ran our own consulting companies. We also learned to identify and then run away when we first met with these potential clients because nothing good ever happened.

The 6th level is negative 1. Working with a negative 1 level will destroy your processes if you are a contracting company providing outsourcing services, like product documentation. Think of it as entropy.

There is a place for the negative 1 level – three people creating some wild new technology in a garage somewhere can actually benefit from this level because it strongly encourages crazy mad ideas that then get tried. These ideas would be shot down any other place because they are crazy mad ideas. But for these people in that garage, it’s a creative environment that works.

The moment these people move into any level of developing the crazy mad ideas into some actual products, level negative 1 will kill them. Perhaps slowly, perhaps quickly, but entropy will have it’s due.

And how do tools fit in here?

Very often, companies with few to no processes decide the problems they’re having are because they don’t have the right tools. If they got the right tools, they reason, this would all be better.

So they build a feature list.

And they buy new tools.

They don’t bother to train anyone, or set up any Best Practices for using the tools. They just buy them, install them, and then continue on the way they’ve been. And nothing changes, except some vendor somewhere got a nice fat check.

New tools are not feature lists

If you (or your company) are thinking about improving how you do the business of what you do, new tools can help a lot. But new tools also require that you look at your existing processes and be brave enough to change what isn’t working. And something isn’t working if you’re looking to get new tools.

Think of purchasing new tools as a time of reflection for your company. Identify what’s not working in your processes and then find tools that support your efforts to make it work better.

Don’t look for new tools based on a feature list – look for new tools based on the business problems you have and the business solutions you need. When you identify the business issues you need to solve, you’re going to be looking at processes as well. You can’t help it.

WritersUA in Long Beach last week was fun. We met a lot of people in the booth and at the show in general. I got to see our product demo-ed by a fellow who has been showing our products for years and that was a huge learning experience for me. He’s very good.

Author-it Morning was a blast. We had more people than we thought attending and everyone was excited and interested. For half the morning, we threw out our stated agenda and did what the audience wanted to see. One attendee said the morning made the entire show worth her while. Good stuff.

Peer showcases

One of the things I really like about WritersUA is the Peer Showcase event. It’s usually the last day in the food and drink area, making it available to everyone. Selected people get to show something interesting they’re doing and answer questions about it. I sat in a demo by a lovely woman who is creating, on average, 1 user guide a day using Author-it. The way she has everything set up so that she swaps out what needs to swap out and then clicks Publish had me amazed.

She uses Release States for product lines. So, for example, content that is common to all manuals are set to one release state with a color. Content that is specific to each product line is set to other release states and colored differently. That lets her see at a glance what belongs to what. I would never have thought of that and it’s a perfect solution to the problems in her workflow.

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

While I watched her talk about how she did what she did, I realized that Author-it lets the 2 writers do the work of 4 writers. Talk about doing more with less! The ROI for this group of writers was measured in days, I think. And, she said, the rock solid publishing profiles meant that she always got what she expected in the output, saving hours a week in production review.

People swarmed around her table, amazed by the workload and the solution.

Local sightings

I’ll be at the Silicon Valley STC chapter March 24 for a preview of Author-it and other fun stuff, if you’re in the area. I’d love to see you there!

After a webinar the other day, I would up chatting in email with a fellow about useful books. So I thought I’d post a list of books I think should be on your bookshelf.

Listed in no particular order:

• Illustrating Computer Documentation: The Art of Presenting Information Graphically on Paper and Online by William Horton

Altho this book was published in 1991, it’s still very relevent today. He covers how to present information visually, especially important for us non-visual learners.

• DITA 101, 2nd edition. by Ann Rockley

Even if you’re not moving to DITA, this book is valuable because it makes you think about how to structure your information to be useful to your readers.

• Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People by Joann T. Hackos

I cannot recommend this book enough. She clearly discusses why content is a business asset and how to manage it.

• Single Sourcing: Building Modular Documentation by Kurt Ament

Do you have any to add to the list? What have I missed?

Since the awful earthquake in New Zealand this week, clients and non-clients all over the world have contacted us, concerned about our staff. This outpouring has moved everyone at Author-it and we’d like to thank all of you.

The Auckland office and all our people in that office are OK. The earthquake was about 400 miles away. All family in the Christchurch area have been accounted for.

Remember, if you want to help the people in Christchurch, contributing to the New Zealand Red Cross is a great way to help.

On a related note

Have you looked at your policies and procedures lately? When a disaster like this happens, it should remind us that we need effective policies and procedures in place. Everyone needs to be trained in what to do.

Make sure yours includes:

• Evacuation plans
• Disaster recovery plans
• Reporting-in plans
• and more

Disasters usually happen suddenly. It’s important for everyone to know what they should do and how to keep the business running (or not) during the disaster.

People at least need to know how to get out of the building and where to meet. If the disaster happens at lunch, do you have a plan in place for people to report in so the missing can be quickly accounted for? Do several people have the cell phone numbers for everyone? Where are those number stored? How is the data in your company being managed for offsite backups? Do you even do offsite backups?

These and more need to be clearly defined so everyone knows what to do. Now might be a very good time to make sure your policies and procedures are up-to-date and people are trained.

You know we’re attending several shows in the next few months. But did you know you have other ways to learn about Author-it?

Webinars

Not only are we attending several trade shows in the near future, we have online webinars available for you to attend.

Author-it Morning at WritersUA

If you are interested in seeing some useful tips, talk to Author-it people, and have some coffee and you’re either in So Cal or at WritersUA in March, you want to jump on the Author-it Morning event March 12 2011, 9am to Noon.

If you’re interested in attending this event, send me an email at sharon.burton@author-it.com with Author-it Morning in the subject line. We’re charging $49 US for the event but I can get that waived. Since I’m organizing the event, I have some sway!

See you then!