How can you maintain your modularized technical documentation over time?

1 Define your content strategy

Before you start creating or updating your modules, you need to have a clear and documented content strategy that defines your goals, audience, scope, standards, and processes. Your content strategy should align with your business objectives and user needs, and guide your decisions on what content to create, reuse, or retire. Your content strategy should also specify how you will organize, label, and manage your modules, as well as how you will measure and evaluate their effectiveness.

2 Use a content management system

A content management system (CMS) is a tool that helps you store, manage, and publish your content in a centralized and structured way. It enables you to create and edit modules using templates and metadata, link and reuse modules across different documents and outputs, track and control versions and changes of modules, automate workflows and tasks such as review, approval, and publishing, search and filter modules based on criteria such as status, date, or author, as well as generate reports and analytics on your content performance and quality. A CMS can help you maintain your modularized documentation.

3 Follow content standards and guidelines

Creating consistent, clear, and compliant modules requires following some content standards and guidelines that define the rules and best practices for your documentation. Style guides should be used to specify the tone, voice, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and formatting of your content. Terminology guides should define the terms, acronyms, abbreviations, and symbols used in your content. Accessibility guidelines should be followed to ensure that your content is readable and understandable by all users, including those with disabilities or special needs. Additionally, localization guidelines should be implemented to guarantee that your content is culturally appropriate and accurate for different languages and regions.

4 Review and update your modules regularly

To keep your modules relevant and accurate, you need to review and update them regularly based on feedback, changes, and new information. Gathering feedback can be done through various sources and methods, such as user testing and surveys, analytics and metrics, stakeholder input and collaboration, and content audits and reviews. When updating modules, it is important to consider the effect of changes on other modules and documents that reuse them. It is also essential to communicate and coordinate with other content creators and managers to avoid conflicts and inconsistencies.