By Mark Lewis | Associate Fellow
In the content world, metrics can be used to prove a business case, communicate value, or predict costs and savings. This column explores new thoughts and ideas in the area of metrics and ROI. Please send your ideas, comments, and questions to mlewis@ditametrics.com.
During a recent trip to Daytona Beach, I sat in stalled traffic on the interstate, frustrated. Two years ago, this coast-to-coast drive was pleasant and relatively quick, but since then, Florida’s population has grown so fast that the infrastructure is straining and construction crews can’t build roads fast enough to keep up with the higher volume of traffic.
I felt similar frustrations with a content solution we used many years ago. My employer’s company had grown, but the documentation department’s capacity had not expanded at the same pace. We couldn’t keep up. So I met with the company’s owner, described my problems, and recommended purchasing some new tools as the solution. The owner rejected my proposal.
Why did I fail? Instead of focusing on the owner’s goals, I was focusing on my own. I did not have the ROI mindset.
What is the ROI mindset?
If you’re a content creator like me, you like words. But executives speak numbers, a language that’s foreign to us. So, it’s a words versus numbers game. Executives control all of the numbers preceded by $. Convincing executives to give you those dollars can be a battle, but with any battle, success is about strategy. You must get leadership’s attention and prove that what you are doing supports the company’s business plan, the business goals. You must prove that your content strategy is in alignment with the corporate strategy. You can design ROI metrics that provide the proof. I’ve been saying this for a few years, but now I’m saying that that is not enough. A strategy is a plan to support a goal. You need to align farther upstream and align all goals and strategies. And then you must apply the lean methodology to your processes, but not in the traditional way. In summary, this is the ROI mindset. Let’s discuss the details.
Why is the ROI mindset important?
The ROI mindset is critical to your survival. You must communicate to executives the value of your department and the content it produces, if you want to:
- Keep your job (and the jobs of your teammates)
- Advance your career
- Keep your resources
- Keep your project
- Justify a new project
- Justify the purchase of new tools or services
- Justify new teammates
How do you apply the ROI mindset?
Supporting the business plan
One of the first questions that I ask a client is, “What are your business goals?” If they don’t know, I show them a list of about 40 typical goals and then tell them to find out what their company’s top three or four goals are. A few examples include increasing revenue, reducing costs, reducing time to market, shortening sales cycles, and increasing customer satisfaction.
Some clients tell me that they want to achieve all of the goals on my long list, but this isn’t possible. Addressing any goal costs time and money, and companies are limited on both. The best strategy is to address the most critical goals—those that are aligned with the company’s mission.
Here are two examples of how to use metrics to prove to executives that the business plan is supported. The first example correlates cost savings with content reuse (see Figure 1). This trend shows that as the rate of content reuse increases, the average cost of producing a content topic drops. These metrics support the company’s goal of reducing cost.
The second example examines time savings with increased content reuse (see Figure 2). When content is reused in the new content solution, the amount of content that must be created is reduced. As a result, the overall time to complete the project is shortened. These metrics support the company’s goal of reducing time to market.
For a detailed list of business goals and metrics that you can gather to prove support, see the “Supporting the business plan” chapter of my book, DITA Metrics 101. Even if you aren’t using DITA, you can apply the methodology described in my book to any schema that supports reuse.
Aligning goals and strategies
As mentioned earlier, a strategy is a plan to support a goal. But business goals aren’t the only type of goal that must be supported. Other types of goals include:
- Content creator goals, which includes the goals of your content department and other roles involved in the content lifecycle, such as SMEs
- Customer (end-user) goals
Before we align strategies, we must align the different types of goals. The best practice is to capture all of these goals and objectives at the beginning of a project using surveys or interviews and then align them.
For example, let’s say that a customer wants your organization to improve support and service. If your company determines that this is an important end-user goal, then your company should have a business goal to “improve support and service,” which is typically a subset of “increase customer satisfaction.” In this scenario, the customer wants improved support in the form of product content that is easier to find and consume than the current support method.
In another example, let’s say you’re a content creator like me. And one of the business goals of your organization is to reduce costs. You could have a goal to create content more easily and efficiently. Your goal to reduce effort would ultimately support the business goal of reducing cost.
After you’ve aligned the business, content creator, and end-user goals, then you can design the strategies that support those goals. Strategies developed in this way should be easier to align.
I’ve found other industries practicing goal alignment. In the March 2016 issue of the Harvard Business Review, the CEO of Rio Tinto, a multibillion dollar metal and mining company, stated that he “requires that all 60,000 of Rio Tinto’s employees to adopt an ‘owner’s mindset’ in order to align their interests [goals] with those of our shareholders.”
After you’ve aligned the goals and the strategies, you’re ready for the next step in the ROI mindset—leaning.
Leaning
This exercise applies to the processes that you must design as part of your strategies. It’s not enough to think about the process, the series of tasks, in terms of ROI. You must think about these tasks from a lean perspective and ask, “Does the result of the task add value?” Typically the question is about adding value to a product, but I suggest that the question should be, “Does the result of the task address a goal?” The goal to be addressed may be any of the business, content creator, or end-user goals. If the result of the task doesn’t address any of these goals, then the task is considered wasteful and should be eliminated.
For example, let’s say you are considering creating content that would improve the sales team’s performance. The content and task may help sales and, therefore, be considered as added value, but if improving the sales team’s performance is not an approved goal, don’t spend any effort creating that content.
Here’s an approach for leaning with an ROI mindset when you are planning on moving from an antiquated content solution to a new solution based on the cool new technologies available.
For each process in your content lifecycle:
- Design an effort-based cost model for the current process.
- Design a new process that takes advantage of new technologies.
- Design an effort-based cost model for the new process.
- Apply the lean methodology to the new process.
- Record how the results of the new process address a goal.
- Record the difference in cost (the savings) between the two cost models.
- Record these activities in a report to executives.
Make sure that the result of each task in each process in your new content solution addresses one of the business, content creator or end-user goals.
Conclusion
Over the past few years, I’ve frequently stated that you need to prove that your content strategy is in alignment with your corporate strategy. And in my book I’ve discussed how to design metrics that provide the proof. Now I’m saying that that is not enough. You should take a more comprehensive approach and adopt the ROI mindset.
A strategy is a plan to support a goal. Before you can align strategies, you must evaluate goals. Review business, content creator, and end-user goals, and align them as best you can. Then work on aligning strategies. The next step is to apply the lean methodology to each task in your processes to ensure that each task addresses at least one of your goals. Along the way, be sure to capture information about your aligning and leaning activities so that you can report them to executives. And yes, that report must include metrics. Remember, your need to speak your corporate leadership’s language of numbers and goals, and that takes the ROI mindset.
