Before you start a content ops project, be sure you know the key players, how they like to communicate, and what their roles are. The Content Strategy Experts podcast breaks down the stakeholders on content ops projects and offers advice on how to get their buy-in to ensure success.
In episode 123 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Gretyl Kinsey wrap up our series on content ops stakeholders and continue their discussion about content authors.
“When you are trying to get executive buy-in on something as a content creator, don’t focus on the tools and the nitty gritty of the tech. That is not the way to get the attention of executives. ”
– Alan Pringle
Content operations (content ops or ContentOps) is the engine that drives your content lifecycle. You need the right workflows in place to ensure your engine is running efficiently. Here are some resources to help you get started:
Digital content is great, but sometimes, I really need the experience of a physical book. To celebrate Scriptorium’s 25th anniversary, we have published a collection of our most popular white papers. All of these featured white papers are available (for free!) on our website, but if you’re having one of those days where only a book will do…this one is for you.
Even when you put an excellent plan for content strategy and solid content operations in place, you can be sure that there will be surprises. Your authors will come up with weird outlier content that your current formatting and your current information architecture can’t accommodate. Faced with a deadline, a quick and dirty solution is appealing.
But those quick fixes have hidden costs that add up over time, especially if the workaround gets popular.
Scriptorium was founded in 1997, which makes 2022 our 25th anniversary year. A lot has changed since 1997, but our overall focus remains the same. From the beginning, we have offered services at the intersection of content, publishing, and technology.
You’ve finished putting together your content strategy and have approval to move forward. It’s time to build out content operations. What does this mean? And how do you ensure success?
Let’s take a look at some of our highlights from the year, including posts and podcasts on content operations (content ops) and personalization.
In episode 108 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Gretyl Kinsey kick off an occasional series about stakeholders and content operations projects. In this episode, they talk about IT groups as an important stakeholder in your content operations.
“The IT department can be such a great ally on a content ops project. IT folks are generally very good at spotting redundancies and inefficiencies. They’re going to be the ones to help whittle that redundancy down.”
– Alan Pringle
Personalization—the delivery of custom, curated information tailored to an individual user’s needs—is becoming an important part of content strategies. Approaches to personalization vary depending on the type of content being served. Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) models, for example, will have very different requirements. Within an organization, you’ll also see marcom and techcomm groups personalize their content in their own ways.
You’ve identified a need for a content strategy project, but you have limited resources available. How can you get enough funding to complete the project? And how do you move the project forward?
Taking a phased approach can enable you to start your content strategy project with limited resources.
Content Operations (content ops or ContentOps) is the engine that drives your content lifecycle.
The Scriptorium Content Ops Manifesto describes the four basic principles of content ops:
Getting started with a content strategy project can be intimidating. There are a lot of unknowns and changes that will take place. How do you ensure the changes you are making address your company’s needs and requirements?
Buyers are looking at your technical content and marketing content prior to the sale. To provide a unified customer experience, you need to integrate the two. Here are some resources to help you get started:
First published in Intercom (October 2020) by the Society for Technical Communication.
Scalable content requires you to assess your content lifecycle, identify points of friction, and remove them.
Company growth magnifies the challenges of information enablement. When you grow, you add products, product variants, markets, and languages—and each of those factors adds complexity. Process inefficiencies in your content lifecycle are multiplied for every new language or customer segment.
As a result, content scalability—increasing content throughput without increasing resources—becomes critical. Consider a simple localization example: when you translate, you have a few manual workarounds that require 1 hour of work per 100 pages of translated content. So if you translate 100 pages of content into 8 languages, you have 8 hours of workarounds. But as your content load grows, you are shipping 1,000 pages of content per month and translating into 20 languages. Suddenly, you are facing 200 hours of manual workarounds per month—the equivalent of one full-time person per year.
Structured content authoring tools behave differently than traditional tools like Microsoft Word, which causes difficulty or reluctance among authors to use them. Structured content imposes strict rules around content purpose (semantics) and placement. These tools diverge from the traditional WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) look and feel, which can be jarring for many authors. Fortunately, many structured authoring tools can be modified to feel less imposing.
Content operations (content ops or ContentOps ) refers to the system your organization uses to develop, deploy, and deliver customer-facing information. Rahel Bailie refers to it as the way that your organization operationalizes your content strategy.
Over at easyDITA, there’s a more aspirational definition, which includes the purpose of good content ops:
Content Operations — ContentOps — is the infrastructure that maximizes your content creators’ efforts and guards against procedural errors by automating as much of the content development process as possible.
Does your content strategy include a plan for publishing consistent content? Technical content is written to inform the user. Marketing content is written to persuade the user to buy your product or service. The line between those two types of content is starting to blur.
When we look at structured content, the first priorities are usually efficiency and cost savings. These savings are gained through intelligent content reuse and automated content delivery. The implicit promise of structured authoring is consistency; use structure, get consistent content. But this isn’t always the case, nor should it be.
With the holidays coming up, people start thinking about food and planning meals. The approach you take when preparing a holiday meal has a lot of similarities to a content strategy project.
In a content strategy project, it’s important to be aware of the monsters lurking in the shadows and waiting to pounce on your project. Here are the gruesome details:
Implementing a content strategy in a single department is a great way to get your feet wet, but doesn’t mean you solve all of your content problems. All customer-facing content needs to be findable and usable. Your clients and prospects expect a seamless user experience across all of your content. If you aren’t delivering on that expectation, it may be time to implement an enterprise content strategy by expanding your current content strategy across your entire organization.
“Whether you like it or not, your prospects already use technical content.”
In the paper age, it cost money to distribute information. That gave big organizations some control over information flow. A prospect interested in purchasing a product would get “pre-sales” information–marketing materials, sales pitches, and perhaps a data sheet. Only after buying the product could the prospect access “post-sales” information, such as technical content. (Buyers could and did request technical information from their sales representative, but the decision whether or not to provide the information rested with the organization.)
But in the digital age, information distribution is free, and that makes it difficult or impossible to control what information people receive. As a result, the distinction between pre-sales and post-sales content is blurring. If you are in the market for a new desk, and you’re considering “some assembly required” options, you might take a look at the assembly guide. If the build process looks daunting, a not-so-handy person may look elsewhere. If you’re considering a piece of software, you might glance at the user documentation to see whether tasks are explained clearly at a level that makes sense to you.
Migrating to DITA means more than just adding element tags. There are a few common holes in migration strategies that can prevent you from reaping all of the benefits of the converted DITA content. To avoid that mistake, make sure you have a plan in place for:
These should be important factors when migrating your content to DITA, and they will require new workflows and changes in the way you handle the relationships in your content.
