Are we driving or being driven?

On my first or second day in my new technical writing job my manager told me, “The CS [customer support] guys have put together a ‘cheat sheet’ for setting up hardware redundancy. They’d just started working with Pat [my predecessor] to get it published as a user guide.”

Image source: Scriptorium

I looked at the cheat sheet: a 40-page Word file describing what works with what (and what doesn’t), the basic setup process, and several “gotchas” to watch out for. Good, useful stuff. Yeah, our customers would like to have this. I can massage it into a user guide.

But when I investigated further, I found a surprise: about half of the cheat sheet consisted of content already in the product documentation. The CS guys were surprised when I pointed that out to them.

So now we have two things going on: the organization has good information that it wants to deliver to its customers. At the same time we’re already delivering good information, but people don’t know it’s there.

My situation exemplifies two of Scriptorium’s Six Trends of 2016 — two trends that at first sound contradictory but actually are closely related in yin-and-yang fashion.

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We’re in DITA – now what?

Every year my talented friends at Scriptorium roll out a list of trends in content strategy and technical communication. This year’s list is thought-provoking as always: it contains some trends that are spot-on and some that I wasn’t expecting.

And one that’s flat-out brilliant: We’re in DITA – now what?

Muscle car (1969 Pontiac GTO – source: Wikimedia Commons, Gtoman)

During the webinar in which Scriptorium unveiled its trends for 2016, Gretyl Kinsey described a “second wave” of DITA adoption: a technical writing team has decided to switch to DITA  — either for the right reasons (as part of a carefully planned strategy) or for the wrong reasons (DITA sounded cool and trendy, or they had some extra money in the budget).

Having gone through the process of converting its content. the team is now finding that DITA isn’t a panacea. The 400-horsepower DITA muscle car is parked in the driveway. Now what do we do with it?

This is when some teams throw up their hands, or when buyer’s remorse sets in. The team, especially if they didn’t have sound reasons for switching to DITA in the first place, might want to return to its old tool set. Or, realizing that they’ve sunk a lot of treasure and talent into the DITA implementation, they’re inclined to limp along — driving the car but never getting out of second gear.

Even when the team made the switch for the right reasons, they might feel overwhelmed. All of the reasons for switching, like cost savings through reuse and greater efficiency in translation, didn’t just magically fall into place. A lot of work is still needed. In this situation, again, some teams content themselves with driving the car to the grocery store and back, never taking it out on the freeway.

What’s the right thing to do?