Losing the red ink

My first day on the job as Publishing Systems Manager started with a pile of paper four inches tall, covered in what looked like liters of red ink. This is what a "typical day" looked like for our creative teams who were working to the best of the abilities with the skills and technology had at the time. These two pages represented almost 90 minutes of work, finding, researching, merging, correcting, redesigning and delivering content from various sources of "content"... email, photocopies, cd's and paper tickets.

The business saw a problem as accuracy, speed overall scale, which (like many) tried to solve for by throwing more people at the ever mounting work. But the real problem, in its simplest form was bad process. At no fault of their own, the creative resources were working with the technology and skills they had, within the bounds that they were expected to work.

"We've always done it this way."

My solution was complex and unfamiliar at first, but also required buy-in from executive leadership, which meant demonstrating a capability, feasibility and a vision for the path forward.

The solution was a new architecture that modularized content, capturing its value and making it available for reuse, refocused efforts on the accuracy of that content, and delivered it in more accessible state. In parallel, automation was built atop this new structured content that delivered speed and accuracy at levels previously unseen. The average 90 minute desk-time standard benchmark for the pages above became 90 seconds, with 100% accuracy.

This automation allowed workflows and schedules to change drastically, but more importantly the business's understanding of what the new norm would be as a result could be shifted also. Instead of a nine month production schedule rushing to meet deadlines with various states of accuracy and incomplete content, curators could now spend the greater majority of those months ensuring the accuracy of that content before final delivery. Actual desk-time was reduced to only six weeks, while annual page counts grew to over 10k annually.

The solution demonstrated a clear message —?this new architecture would take just as much time to deliver incomplete, incorrect content, as it would to deliver complete and accurate content. The understanding of "problem" was no longer a question of production scale, but rather the business processes attached to the content it was racing to deliver. Year over year, the process improved and was delivered to other lines of business, delivering more success, more results and greater understanding of how innovation is almost always the answer to the thinking - "we've always done it this way".

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#innovation #creative #automation #xml #xslt #transformation #influence #trust #adobeindesign #ateja