Welcome to the July edition of the Content Matters newsletter. Today we want to talk about your technical publishing strategy and six things you should consider as you develop and put yours into practice.
A technical publishing strategy involves refining the processes and approaches used to create, publish, and maintain technical documentation across your company. There's a lot to think about before you even put pen to paper (or keys to computer). Let's dive in.
- Embrace Agile Documentation Practices: Break documentation creation and management into manageable chunks or tasks, prioritize them based on user needs and feedback, and iterate on the content in short, iterative cycles. You also need to involve stakeholders and end-users throughout the documentation process to gather feedback early and often.?Don't leave collaboration to the end; collaboration is key to adoption.
- Streamline Content Creation Workflows: Define the process to create, edit, review, approve, and translate your documentation (the process may vary by documentation type or by the department that creates the content). Define a workflow that can support the process, noting where differences may need to occur and what they are. When you implement the workflow in your CCMS, it should include version control to ensure you are tracking changes and can quickly roll back to a previous version if needed. Version control can also allow you to work on new versions of documentation while the current version is still in production.??
- Implement Continuous Integration and Delivery: Apply continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) practices to streamline the publishing and deployment of technical documentation. Automated build and deployment pipelines can generate, test, and publish documentation updates automatically whenever changes are made to the content.?Depending on the size of your tech docs team and the complexity of your documentation, this process may take some time to figure out and put in place, but it's worth it in the long-run.
- Leverage Data-driven Insights: Monitor usage metrics, user feedback, and engagement data to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement. Use A/B testing, user surveys, and usability testing to validate assumptions and prioritize enhancements based on user needs and preferences.?One of your goals should be to always improve your documentation to support your end-users.
- Invest in Training and Development: Invest in training and development programs to enhance the skills and capabilities of technical writers, editors, and publishers. Provide training on topics such as writing for clarity and conciseness, accessibility best practices, structured authoring techniques, and publishing tools and technologies. It's essential to have indepth training and support on the tools you use. Tool adoption is often a major challenge for teams who aren't adequately trained following your specific publishing process.
- Promote Community Engagement and Collaboration: Foster a sense of community and collaboration among technical writers, subject matter experts, and end-users to improve the quality and relevance of technical documentation. Encourage peer review, crowdsourcing, and community-driven content contributions to enrich the documentation ecosystem.?Listen to your team and take time to understand their ideas and perspectives. This is their day-to-day work and no one will understand it better than they do.
Remember to remain agile and adaptive in response to evolving user needs, technological advancements, and industry trends. By implementing these suggestions, you can improve your technical publishing strategies and deliver high-quality documentation that meets the needs of their users effectively.???
Did we miss anything? Share your perspectives in the comments.
We're taking the month of August off for the podcast, but we have a great fall line-up that we'll share with you next month, including
Latané Conant (she/her)
and more from the great
Alan J. Porter
. Until then, if you didn't catch our July episode with the
Dr. Lance Cummings
, you can still watch the replay or listen on your favorite podcast host (like Apple Podcasts).
Here are a few articles that caught our attention this month:
Understanding and optimizing the buyer's journey is paramount to acquiring and retaining customers. Each stage of the journey (awareness, consideration, decision, and post-purchase) presents a unique opportunity to engage and influence your potential customers. This was the topic of our latest Ingeniux Minute. Check out the post here.
Ingeniux is the leading provider of content management and customer portal software.?Ingeniux helps organizations create modern websites, customer support portals, and other customer touchpoints.?With an unparalleled focus on the content itself, we?design our software to enable content reuse, true mobile and multi-channel content delivery, and insightful content discovery. Our unique content-as-a-service capabilities deliver content into web and mobile applications and other key channels.
See Ingeniux in action. View a 4-minute product tour. View the Demo
Like what you are reading? Please share it with your colleagues and customers. Or did a friend forward this to you? Subscribe to have the newsletter delivered to your inbox, we'd love to have you.
