Toward a Documentation Strategy

By Dick Miller | Associate Fellow

There’s an old joke that goes like this:

Passenger: “Where are we going?”

Driver: “I don’t know, but we’re making great time!”

Have you ever felt that way? That things were humming along, but you had this nagging thought that there had to be more to it than this? As a senior technical documentation specialist and manager, I certainly have, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you have also. There is more to it. This article attempts to explore where we’re going and why.

The answers to the following questions are components of a documentation strategy.

• What is a strategy?

• Which documentation are we talking about?

• Why have a documentation strategy?

• What are the basic components of a documentation strategy?

• How will you know when you’re finished with the strategy?

• How do you get executive support for a documentation strategy?

• After you’ve answered these questions, what do you do next?

If you’re a leader of a documentation organization, thinking about these issues and answering these questions is most appropriate to your role, and you may have answers to several of the questions already.

What is a Strategy?

According to Wikipedia, “Strategy, a word of military origin, refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. In military usage strategy is distinct from tactics, which are concerned with the conduct of an engagement, while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked. How a battle is fought is a matter of tactics: the terms and conditions that it is fought on and whether it should be fought at all is a matter of strategy, which is part of the four levels of warfare: political goals or grand strategy, strategy, operations, and tactics.”

Those of us who have engaged in battles over documentation may resonate with the military implications, but, for our purposes, let’s define strategy as the plans we make to achieve our documentation goals, while tactics are the things we do in implementing the plans.

Be careful, however, about using the word “strategy.” Because of its overuse in trendy business exercises in the past, some people may associate a certain amount of emotional baggage with the word. If that’s the case in your situation, use “context,” “metaplan,” or some other term that conveys your meaning.

Which Documentation?

Technical communicators may be responsible for many different kinds of documentation. For the purpose of this article, we’ll use a rather inclusive definition. Documentation includes all artifacts in any medium that are used to enhance and facilitate use, sale, or support of an organization’s products or services. This may include documentation for end users of the products, for people who support those end users, for potential or existing customers, or for internal use.

Realize that the kind of documentation on which you focus may be very much determined by where the company is in its life cycle. A startup may find that sales and marketing collateral is most important, while a more mature company may consider documentation that can help manage expenses to increase profitability as more important. You’ll have to adjust your immediate focus to reflect the situation in your own organization.

This documentation may be delivered in a variety of formats, such as printed manuals, embedded help, Web content, marketing collateral, social media posts, or many others; it doesn’t matter. Those choices are tactical, and we won’t be discussing them here.

Why a Documentation Strategy?

In Preparing Instructional Objectives, the internationally recognized guru of instructional design, Dr. Robert F. Mager, says, “… if you’re not sure where you’re going, you’re liable to end up someplace else.”

The main purpose of developing a documentation strategy is to answer the question, “Where are we going with our documentation?” Having a clear end point in mind and communicating it well to the interested parties helps focus everyone’s eyes on the prize. As Dr. Steven Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, put it, “Begin with the end in mind.”

If we look back at our Wikipedia definition, it refers to both “grand strategy” and “strategy.” The grand strategy is analogous to your organization’s corporate strategy and the strategy is analogous to your documentation strategy. The documentation strategy needs to be consistent with, informed by, and supportive of the corporate strategy. For this reason, those who are responsible for developing a documentation strategy should be at the table when corporate strategy is discussed.

A documentation strategy must be valuable for the business. It can be a tool for decreasing expenses, increasing revenue, or increasing operational efficiency or effectiveness.

Documentation Strategy Basics

Now that we’re clear on what we mean by documentation strategy and why we should have one, we need to look at what needs to be done to build one.

Where are you now?

Begin with an audit of how much you already know about three of the most critical foundations of a documentation strategy:

• Corporate needs

• User characteristics

• User needs

The following sections examine these three critical foundations.

What are your organization’s goals for the documentation?

Your organization wouldn’t be supplying documentation without reasons. Some of these reasons are fairly obvious, some less so. These may include:

• Users need to know how to install the product.

• Users need to have a reference on detailed information about the product.

• Company support people need to have a reference to help deal with troubleshooting user issues.

• Company sales and marketing people need to use it as a sales tool.

• Product development people need to understand about aspects of the product outside their own areas of interest.

• The company needs to provide it because all their competitors do.

• The company’s technical instructors need to use it as instructional materials so the company can sell training as an additional source of revenue.

• The company sees their excellent product documentation as a competitive advantage.

• The company can use awards for their documentation in company press releases.

There are undoubtedly many other goals, and some of them may not be easy to determine. However, it’s worthwhile to discover as many of these goals as you can, because it’s important for your documentation strategy to be addressing the right problems. It’s also helpful to identify any champions of specific goals. They can be your allies in moving the strategy forward.

Who are the users of the documentation?

If you don’t already have a comprehensive user population description in place, you can tap a number of resources to create one. These may include:

• Product developers

• Training designers and developers

• Technical instructors

• Marketing people

• User experience and usability people

• Support desk specialists

• Field engineers

• Actual users

Much of the information you need to know may be available, but in diverse locations and formats. Don’t overlook sources such as:

• Marketing requirements documents

• Product requirements documents

• Marketing plans

• Product development plans and forecasts

• Product usage scenarios

• User personas and profiles

• Field engineering reports

• Training evaluations by users

• Training design documents

• Corporate customer surveys

• Independent industry surveys

Needless to say, a strategy directed toward the wrong audience won’t work.

Keep in mind that the strategy should be aware of potential future users so that it can be modified, if needed, when the audience changes.

What are the users’ goals for the documentation?

Always remember this: no matter how much you think you understand the users, empathize with them, feel their pain, or wish you could make it all better for them, you are not a typical user. You need facts, not feelings. The best way to get those facts, of course, is to ask the users themselves. More than once I have been the bearer of sad tidings to developers, marketers, and others who thought they knew what users needed or wanted when I revealed the results of some direct user research.

If you’re unable to obtain first-person information, ask those people who have it. This might include field service people, help desk people, instructors, market researchers, user experience specialists, and others who have direct contact with users.

Keep in mind, too, that user goals may sometimes conflict with company goals. You then have the difficult task of finding a direction for the documentation strategy that might be suboptimal for one or the other or both interested parties, but at least is acceptable to both.

How will you know when you’re done?

You’re not. As the organization’s needs and strategy change, the characteristics of the user populations change, and the user’s needs change, you’ll need to modify your original strategy to accommodate those changes.

If the changes are dramatic, those modifications can be extensive. Dramatic changes might include:

• Your company decides to pursue a new line of products or a new market.

• Your company’s product changes to include a new population of users.

• Your user population changes its preferred delivery medium for documentation. While this is largely a tactical issue, you should examine your strategy to make sure it’s consistent with the new delivery method.

Any change to any of the three basic considerations requires that you reexamine your answers and make appropriate changes. In this sense, a documentation strategy is truly a living document. As such, be sure to communicate those changes to all stakeholders and to reinforce behaviors that are consistent with the new documentation strategy.

It doesn’t hurt to make sure you’re close to being done and that you’ve done a good job. Involve the members of the documentation team in the process. If you’re a one-person organization, involve some of the internal customers of your documentation.

How do you get executive support?

You get executive support by helping the management team understand how this is going to increase the probability of success for the business. Without that you’ll have very little chance for adoption because there will be other things that will take precedence.

It’s most likely that you won’t be the decider about whether the documentation strategy is adopted. Some executive will have to approve it. You therefore need to demonstrate convincingly that your informed recommendations are the way to go.

Begin by documenting all the findings you made in answering the critical questions. Next, summarize those findings in a one-page or one-slide presentation that makes the case for implementing the strategy. Finally, determine whose authority you need and make your pitch.

One of the best ways to get executive support is to show how implementing your documentation strategy is going to be good for the company’s bottom line, market share, or reputation. If you key your one-page summary to those results, chances are good that the executive will want to know more. Have the supporting information available in supplementary slides or a complete report if it’s needed.

Be prepared for the ideas in your pitch to be declined. Even the most reasoned and attractive idea may be passed over for reasons beyond your control. If that’s the case, determine which elements of the strategy are in your sphere of control and which you can implement without violating any constraints of time or resources. Put in place those elements you can and prepare to gather data that shows the bottom-line improvements that they made. You’ll then be further prepared to make another pitch in the future when business conditions change.

Even if you’re not able to get executive-level support for publishing and implementing a formal documentation strategy, you’ve already won a consolation prize. You’ve gained some killer insights into your target audience, examined your delivery methods, and shone light on other aspects of the way you do your job that can only help in improving the quality of what you do.

What’s next?

This is obviously not a comprehensive discussion of the topic. The next step is to find out what it means for you. Engaging in dialogs with like-minded professionals is probably the best way to do this.

There are many ways to initiate those dialogs. For example:

• Meet a colleague over coffee to get things started.

• Blog on the subject.

• Chat with colleagues at your next STC chapter meeting.

• Offer to make a presentation to a technical writing class at your local college or university.

• Gather your thoughts and request a half hour with one of your company executives who might serve as a champion for your ideas at company strategy meetings.

• Put together a panel discussion on the subject for a meeting of your local STC chapter or another local professional society.

• Request an informational interview with someone who has developed and implemented a strategy, not necessarily for documentation.

• Propose a follow-up article for Intercom.

In addition to helping to inform further development of your documentation strategy, these discussions could serve as a foundation for a proposal to expand your sphere of responsibility into collaborating with those responsible for user experience, website content management, or marketing collateral.

I hope this article has provided you with some food for thought as you move toward developing your own documentation strategy.

Dick Miller (dick_miller@pmug.org) has spent decades helping people do their jobs more effectively and efficiently through technical documentation, instructional design, work process analysis, and user experience analysis. Thanks to Bob Fordham, Steve Frison, Jeff Gansberg, Luke Kanies, Patti Loverink, Garret Romaine, John Stark, Dick Thomas, Phyllis Thompson, and Joanne Wakeland for sharing their thoughts on this topic.