By Johanne Lavallée | Member
What Happens Beyond a Content Audit?
Most technical communicators are organizers; we write procedures. Content reuse, when proposed, is often something we greet with a sincere carpe diem!
But how do you establish a content reuse strategy? You might now have the support from management to research a solution. You might be working on your business plan. You will need to know many things:
- What is reusable in your content?
- What is it going to cost?
- How long will it take?
- How will you do this?
- How will you build the reuse mosaic?
What’s the Magic Number that Makes Reuse Worth It?
It is very difficult to answer this question for one simple reason: once reuse begins, it keeps rising as you become familiar with content-based writing. It also depends on whether you are already in a structured world with conditional text and variables, such as in FrameMaker or Flare.
In Mark Lewis’s DITA Metrics 101 book, a standard topic is shown as an example to be 4.5 to 5.5 hours to write, whereas the same reusable topic takes around 8 hours. That’s a 30% difference, but if you are covering three models with that topic, because you insert a variable that changes according to models, it costs 60% less (8 hours compared to 3 x 5 hours). Table 1 illustrates a product guide created with or without reusable topics.
Organize Costs
Several costs will help you determine if content reuse is worth it. The following costs should be reduced with reuse:
- Cost of content creation—What is your balance between creation and reuse? As mentioned earlier, reuse will weigh heavier as time passes.
- Cost of content analysis and inventory—Content analysis is paramount for DITA, and other methods will also require at least some mind mapping.
- Cost of review and project management—Review costs drop when you have one master and review several products at once. The same goes for project management after the learning curve, which consists basically in getting used to see all your product main parts as puzzle pieces.
- Cost of content maintenance—Using masters and reusing topics significantly reduces maintenance costs.
- Cost of translation—Translation expenses drop as much as the reuse percentage.
There are also two new costs that you will need to compare with the expected costs reduction.
- Cost of converting legacy content to DITA—A task that you could assign to an intern.
- Cost of filtering and publishing—For DITA adopters, this task is often turned over to consultants to save time.
Organize Needs
If you are in Word and only need print and PDF files, staying in Word eliminates these two new costs. Interesting solutions such as SmartDocs allow for the smallest learning curve, especially if your team requires interdisciplinary teamwork. There is no conversion time, chunks of text to be reused are mixed in standard Word content, and no new software needs to be added. Multi-channelling is possible with WebWorks ePublisher, which is compatible with everything.
The most important thing is to take the time to think, plan, and realize there will be trials and errors. Do not switch to DITA just because everybody else is—examine your needs first. This conviction will need to be clear when it’s time to teach your team and convince them. Your motivation will convince your expressive individuals and your facts will convince the analytical ones.
If you are using structured FrameMaker, with variables and conditions, chapters, TOC files, and such, you are already optimized. It’s multi-channelling that will justify your move, and publishing in multiple formats and to varied audiences—epubs, PDFs, online help for desktop software, help for mobiles, customers in Japan, in Australia, in China—all have their preferences. Multi-channelling is also possible in Word.
Organize Content Audit
One problem with a content audit is generating document lists that can be reused in Excel. We did our first audit with paper and highlighters, not very earth-friendly. Reusable file lists can be generated in DOS, but it is difficult to do in Windows without typing each file name manually.
One solution we found was the Acrobat advanced search. We performed a search on the subject of our audit, selecting the folder that contains all manuals. Our audit aimed to find content on batteries, which most of our products had. So we typed the word battery. We saved the results as a CSV file and there we had usable data! The file provided a summary of the search, the file name, its title, the page of the keyword instance, and the actual instance where the word was found.
You could perform your content audit via a book sprint approach. A book sprint brings together a group of writers to produce a book in three to five days. There is no pre-production and the group is guided by a facilitator from zero content to published book (www.booksprints.net/about). If you can build such a team, not only will you have your audit done quickly, but you will also have all these sets of eyes on your content and the reviewers you dream of, because developers know their audience and the subject matter (http://fr.slideshare.net/sarahmaddox/stc-summit2013-presentationsarahmaddoxdocsprints).
Organizing Content: The Content Puzzle!
You know your products well, but you need to determine what will be task, concept, reference (snippets only in Word), and what will be filtered (conditions in Word). You will also need to determine variables and how write to have the smallest number of possible variables.
Variables and Translation
If your product is fruit, then the content of the variable could be apple, pear, or grape. When fruit translates with articles that have gender, the fun begins. Apple, pear, and grape become la pomme, la poire, and le raisin in French. So you cannot write le <fruit> because it could be also la <fruit>. One solution is to stay neutral. Use as little variables as possible. But you may eventually have to tackle this issue. The same goes for plural and this occurs even in English: carrot(s) and potato(es), for instance. Keep to the generic word (vegetable), or include the article in the variable list. But the most reasonable approach is to remain as general as possible, and chunk the text in smaller parts.
Mind Mapping
Content analysis and inventory of tasks, concepts, and references are well documented. Building documents is harder to define. Invest time up front to inventory identical, similar, and unique content so you can design filtering and reuse strategies that satisfy your business requirements without making your content unmanageable. It’s far less expensive to plan and implement reuse from the beginning than to retrofit reuse later (Lewis 2012). Table 2 shows an approach that worked for us.
First, you need to decide how to divide blocks of information. We took our four products and built a matrix of all possible options.
Then you see how to group the text chunks. Consider each line in Table 3 as a block of text (a task). Green applies to products 1 and 2, blue is product 3 only, grey is 4 only, and yellow is common to products 3 and 4. Products 2, 3, and 4 have a common text, which ended up being a new reuse chunk that had not been expected.
Conclusion
By using one of your major skills—organizing—your content reuse strategy project will come to life much faster because you are using a familiar approach. Like any project, you will need to define feasibility, needs, and costs, and be well prepared and ready for multitasking and leadership challenges. This experience was a career change for me and I was praised by the management for learning it.
JOHANNE LAVALLÉE works at Signalisation Ver-Mac in Quebec, Canada, a manufacturer of portable intelligent traffic control solutions and equipment. Her current content strategy was adopted following Atlanta’s STC Summit in 2013. She contributes to LinkedIn Technical Writer, Technical Writer Forum, and STC France, and will be attending LavaCon later this year.
References
Lewis, Mark. 2008. “DITA Metrics: Cost Metrics.” In Cost Metrics Overview. Retrieved from http://dita.xml.org/sites/dita.xml.org/files/DITA%20Metrics%20Cost%20Metrics.pdf.
Lewis, Mark. 2012. DITA Metrics 101. Schomberg, ON, Canada: The Rockley Group Inc.
