Make it easy: Automate

Automation is in and learning it, is the trend. I always had the idea that nothing can be tougher than automation, till I was hit by the automation bug itself. I am technical writer by profession and there are myriad products we work on with varied processes to deal with these products. It is just not the product but the guides that we need to deliver. From the writing processes to delivering outputs, everything needs minute detailing. Since the delivering process and the output generation was mundane and had to follow one particular process, we decided to shift our focus on the writing part.

Since there are a lot of products that are based on automation, we decided to automate the whole writing part. It is seriously not easy to have a process in place with little or no technical background. I always have that query how do we automate and honestly, what is automation. We all automate our processes so that we can make things easier and save a lot of time. Using a process or tool to minimize the human effort is all about automation. Well, putting that tool or process in place is the real work. There comes in the human effort. With the product that we were working, we had feed the text files to a python script, which, in return, would generate HTML files.

It is just not the question of particular products that are hard to tame. But about any other product that takes a lot of your time. Try to study the nature of the product and what can be done to make it easier to document or script. I just wanted to share the process we embraced and, which is still in initial stages.

1. Stage 1: Format the text files. We had to have a uniform text files so that any character, which is a mismatch, can be same uniformly. The text files need to be fed to the python scripts so that they can generate the HTML files without much glitches.
2. Stage 2: Write a python script. If you are not equipped to write a script, hire someone who can do it. It is an important stage for automation. Once the script is in place, the automation is easier. The people who write the script would be able to get the text files through them. It also involves making the links right so that the hyperlinks work. You also need to put the image files in a folder and create a placeholder in the python script that can pull in the particular image. It all depends on the correct collaboration between the person who automates and the owner of the document.
3. Stage 3: Migrating the HTML files to an authoring tool. Here comes the work of the technical writer. Once the files are successfully automated, you can migrate the HTML files to your authoring tool. It is a humongous job as it needs the expertise of using CSS (Cascading Style Sheet). If you are a technical writer and are familiar with the style sheet you use, you can apply it to the files. Formatting is equally important to have a crisp and sharp document. Since most of the XML and HTML based authoring tools have a WYSIWYG program, it makes it easier to know how the output would look like.
4. Stage 4: Generating an output. This doesn't take much time. Once you see what the output looks like, you can go ahead with creating a doc package to include it in the main product build.

The stages are about the initial stage of automating a document. There is still a lot of sharpening needed to fully automate a process so that the outputs are not harmed. After all, saving time and energy should be our motto when delivering our products. The processes are all in our hand and how we do it should be our onus too. Hope we master the process of automation and make the processes our slaves, rather than slaving ourselves.