Clinging to Ownership: Rescuing Content from SMEs

By Maria Willacy | Member

Subject matter experts (SMEs) can be great assets—they provide knowledge, resources, credibility, and often the main content with which we work. But SMEs, perhaps unwittingly, can also be one of the biggest hindrances to technical communicators. They can be the fire blocking our way through a door to achieving good content, a formidable force that can sometimes be impossible to overcome and painful to navigate through. Without their trust, technical communicators may be left trapped in a haze of confusing sentences, with SMEs ignoring their advice and clinging to ownership. How can technical communicators get past such barricades to deliver good content? They can find another way through the fire.

Another Way Through

The most direct path for technical communicators to accomplish their work is to receive or create content and revise it into clear, concise materials readers find useful. But when SMEs are allowed to ignore our revisions, disregard our questions, and submit content without branding or formatting, technical communicators and the resulting good content are burned in the process. When appeals to management yield the answer, “Ultimately, the SMEs are the authors, so defer to them if they don’t like your changes,” what is a technical communicator to do? Instead of feeling helpless, find another way to accomplish your goals:

• Practice customer service. The first and perhaps most basic way to convince SMEs you’re helping and not hurting their content is to provide exceptional customer service. This means listening to their needs first, assuring them you are there to help, and highlighting the value in their content. If you’re doing this, you’re one step closer to a SME wanting to help you in return.
• Develop guidelines and explain processes. Information is power, and when SMEs or management don’t fully understand what we do, they’re likely to stick to what they know instead. When we come into contact with a new manager or SME, it may help to show them specifics, such as a levels of edit sheet, style guide, or example of your work (see Figure 1). This helps gain their trust, which is key to relinquishing some ownership into your hands.

• Keep asking questions. Just because you’ve been ignored or told “no” multiple times doesn’t mean you should stop asking. It’s the technical communicator’s job to ask questions and to point out inconsistencies. Just make sure you don’t annoy SMEs by repeatedly asking the same question—the goal is to get them on our side, not convince them we don’t understand their side.
• Provide options. SMEs are busy and most aren’t wordsmiths, so they are more likely to change content if it requires less work for them. Instead of simply pointing out an inconsistency or an awkward sentence, provide options for the solution. Options let them feel like they still have control, and doing the work for them saves them time to focus on their priorities (see Figure 2).

• Rotate jobs. Sometimes personalities don’t mesh or a frustrating job leaves a lasting impression. While this doesn’t mean the technical communicator and SME shouldn’t work together again, it may mean a break is good. If you have the option, try pairing another technical communicator with the SME on future projects and see if you get better results.
• Accept losses. Losses are what we’re trying to avoid, so why should we accept them? Because to win some, sometimes you have to lose some. The idea is that your work in other areas will eventually sway SMEs toward helping you accomplish your goals but, in the meantime, you need to show you’re willing to work with them as well.
• Represent the bottom line. Although easier said than done, finding examples that show the monetary benefit your work provides is especially helpful in gaining support for your work. This might mean conducting usability testing on a procedure you wrote versus the version the SME wrote—how many calls came in, and how much subsequent time did the company save from users who followed your procedure?

Many technical communicators have to work with SMEs, and often we enjoy it. But when the value of our work is forced to take a backseat to ownership and distrust, it’s our job to keep striving to show our value. If we do this, doors will eventually open, and we can walk through them without fighting fires.

Maria Willacy is a technical editor at Idaho Power in Boise, Idaho. She graduated from Boise State University in 2010 with a BA in English, technical communication emphasis. She has nearly five years of technical communication experience and is pursuing an MA in interdisciplinary studies with a corporate communications emphasis from BSU.