TOPIC-BASED WRITING: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

Every journey begins with a single step. For one division of Verint Systems, that journey began when the combination of company mergers and acquisitions, a global writing team, and a wide array of products resulted in a vast wealth of content that users found difficult to navigate and to use to access product information. The way to combat the evils of redundancy, information gaps, and inconsistency seemed to be structured authoring.

This session explores the many challenges and obstacles the team faced as they rolled out the plan for structured authoring – including:

• The reason they started with topic-based writing
• The variables that affected the decision-making process
• The timeline involved
• Where they turned for help
• How they “sold it” to the rest of the global team
• How they trained a global team
• The tools they used
• The environment in which all of this had to happen (Spoiler alert: Engineering group adopted Agile methodology and completely redesigned the UI for a major release in same timeframe.)

What happened? How was the content received? Was it worth it? Attendees will discover the answers to these questions and more, plus how creative problem-solving can help you get past the technical, political, logistical, and even emotional challenges and obstacles you can encounter even on a well-planned journey.