Matt Sullivan: Bootstrapping Your Initiatives

@mattrsullivan | [email protected]

F O U N D E R , T E C H C O M M T O O L S Matt Sullivan

Bootstrapping your initiatives

Question: What’s the easiest way to get budget for your

initiatives

It’s always easier to play with

“house money”

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Case Study 1: I want what he’s got!

GOAL: Create enough space in

localization budget to fund improvements in structured

documentation model

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 Nonconforming content

 Inline formatting resulting in:

 Localization of binary files, instead of XML, resulting in -  4x increase in content to localize

 What they had


 Made adjustments to content model and related controls in the environment

 Educated authors on proper editing technique

 Started supplying structured files (content only) for localization

 What we did


 About 30% increase in productivity

 About 50% decrease in localization expense

 And…

 What they got after pilot

Enough street cred to further improve system and drive down expenses


Case Study 2:

The whole enchilada

GOAL: Proof of concept for migration to DITA and upload of DITA to

Adobe Experience Manager


 Unstructured content in CMS

 Exported to generic XML

 Painfully transformed to compliant XML

 Mired in custom programming and post processing of content -  Processing of graphic icons alone was

killing production cycle

 Loaded to ECM (Enterprise content management system)

 What they had


 Proposed blueprint project -  Start conversion -  Start templates - Train on structured authoring

 BONUS: Recognized duplication of programming effort

Technique


 Retention of current CMS for version control

 Direct editing of XML (DITA)

 Direct upload to AEM ECM (Enterprise content management system) - Web content -  Localization (machine translation) -  PDF

 What they got after pilot


Case Study 3:

Winning the jackpot


 What they had


 Followed by this


 And this…

GOAL: Employee retention and workflow simplification


 Asked for 1 month to produce results

 Whittled style usage from 350+ tags to 30-ish tags

 Imposed corporate branding procedures across all divisions

 Result: A dozen years later, the same base template is still in place, with consistency across documentation

 Technique


Case Study #4

To spin, or not to spin


 Background


 What they had


 And this guy


 Until they didn’t

GOAL: Maintain updates to book and improve branding, consistency,

and organization


 Took the long view of their docs, and addressed the holes in the system

 Worked weekly with manager to - Create consistency - Convert docs to new format

 Technique


 1.5 years later


 Total project cost was equivalent to previous editor’s salary

 Director of education was editing all 16 manuals simultaneously

 Formatting and organization greatly improved

 Upon completion of project, 45 hours for editor + 10 hours for director 5 hours for director

 Net gains


 Look at your largest budget items to identify candidates for

 Identify the leaks in the current system

 Pitch (smaller) projects to fix the leaks, where savings will serve to fund larger initiatives

 Make sure that both the initial and the follow-up projects have clear and defined goals that align with management objectives

Takeaways


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Matt Sullivan: Bootstrapping Your Initiatives

Leadership & Management

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