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ISSUE 1: SEPTEMBER 2005 In This Issue:
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SAVE MONEY, IMPROVE QUALITY: Single Source Your Docs & Training by Val Swisher, President, Oak Hill Corporation Technical documentation development and training development have historically been separate activities. I strongly recommend that these activities be combined. The result of single sourcing docs and training is better quality documentation, better quality training, and a savings of one-fourth to a third of the cost of separate development efforts. Improved Documentation Traditionally, technical documentation has been written from an expository stance: first I’m going to tell you what the widget is, then I’m going to tell you about all its different parts. Next, I’m going to explain installation, and in the end I will have told you everything there is to know about the widget. As anyone who has used this kind of documentation knows, it takes a will of iron to actually read it. When documentation is approached from a task-based orientation, it becomes easier to grasp. Task-based documentation looks at all the ways in which the user might need to work with the widget and walks the user through the various tasks associated with using the widget. Task-based documentation focuses on “How do I do my job,” rather than “How does this widget work.” It is easier, more engaging, and more effective to read documentation that is task-based. People frequently complain that documentation isn’t useful. That’s because the writer hasn’t sat down and considered what the intended user does for a living. The writer needs to ask questions like, “What does this person need to get his or her job done? What does this person do in his or her job and how do those functions relate to my product?” When the writer considers what people do with a product in terms of installing it, working with it and solving problems with it, the resulting documentation (and training) is much more useful to the reader. Improved Training Technical product training is often delivered in a classroom setting. While this can be very effective, the quality of the experience may be negatively affected by:
You cannot eliminate the variable of the instructor in the classroom setting, but you can minimize the difference in results between an excellent instructor and a poor instructor by providing an extremely detailed student guide. A detailed student guide assures that every student, no matter where they take the course or from whom, receives the same technical content at the same level of detail. If the instructor is weak in a particular area, the student still has several detailed pages as reference on that topic. Another potential issue with the classic classroom instructor-led PowerPoint scenario is that the student experience may be reduced to several days of frantic note taking. It is fairly well documented in educational and training circles that a classroom environment that allows students to experience and interact with the materials, instructor, and fellow participants results in a higher level of comprehension and retention. An increased level of useable and accessible detail in the student guide reduces the student’s need to take detailed notes. If the student knows that the critical information is all in the guide, he or she has a much greater opportunity for active participation in the class experience. Documentation Can’t Substitute for the Student Guide The question I anticipate being asked at this point is: “Why not just take the documentation and give it to the student in the classroom? What’s the benefit from repeating so much of the documentation in the training guide?” This is where the concept of single sourcing becomes so powerful. If the documentation is task-oriented in the first place, the transition to training materials becomes natural and easy. Shifting to a task-based orientation also improves the quality and accessibility of the documentation itself, because it describes the way that people work with the product, not just what the product does. In a classroom setting, students don’t want to sit for days while the instructor goes over every feature A through Z –– that’s the worst sort of training class. A student wants to understand the tasks involved in using the product, not memorize a list of features. So good documentation and good training are built upon a common foundation of task orientation. It may take a more creative and seasoned technical writer and curriculum developer to create task-based materials, but the reward is that the documentation and the training are much more useful to the user. And users who understand products and use them well are users who are repeat customers. (They are also users who spend less time on the phone with tech support!) The Economics of Single Sourcing The ultimate payoff of single sourcing is that it actually costs less to do it better. In general, my experience is that single sourcing documentation and training costs from one-third to one-fourth less than doing it the traditional way. To demonstrate how these costs work out in a real-world situation, let’s examine a project that Oak Hill Corporation recently completed for a client, Corporation X. Corporation X needed an administrator guide for their product, estimated at 400 pages. The company also needed a student guide and a PowerPoint deck for classroom instruction, with illustrations based on the user guide, but adapted for instructional use. We estimated the student guide would be close to 700 pages. It was significantly longer than the user documentation because of the addition of lab exercises, review questions, and slides. Total for all projects, developed separately: Student Guide........ $33,061.38 PowerPoint Deck........ $24,862.07 Administrator Guide........ $53,600.00 Total........... $111,523.45 Some imaginative thinking and a little planning resulted in a new proposal to Corporation X for single sourcing the documentation and training from the same materials, resulting in this revised estimate: Total for all projects, single sourced: Administrator Guide and Student Guide........ $43,215.71 PowerPoint Deck........ $25,306.07 Total........... $68,581.78 In summary, developing the documentation and training together, from the same materials, created a savings to Corporation X of $42,941.67, or 38 percent under the original estimate. Where do the savings come in? On the face of it, it’s the same materials, created by the same people, so why does single sourcing result in such spectacular savings? The answer lies in the fact that when single sourcing, the development is done once instead of twice. There is still additional material developed specially for students, but the leverage is in the overlap. A Happy Ending “We worked with Oak Hill to single source our documentation and training at Evident Software,” says Dan Zeck, now vice president of Engineering at Antenna Software. “The project ran very smoothly –– there were none of the usual bumps we see between the docs team and the training team, because they were the one and the same. It’s a rare situation when you can improve outcome and save money at the same time. I think we probably saved a third of the total cost by single sourcing.” It’s a mystery to me that more technology companies aren’t pursuing single sourcing as a standard. More frequently than not, I see two different groups of people –– technical writers working on tech docs, and courseware developers working on training courses –– and they aren’t collaborating. Single sourcing does require a change in the way documents are developed. And it does require thinking about how to organize both documents and training around tasks rather than description –– a change from the way many companies are doing things today. These are minor factors when compared to the benefits. The cost-savings of one-third to one-fourth the cost of traditional, parallel development are compelling enough. Add to this the cost savings realized in revision and the improvement in user deployment and user experience, and the argument for single sourcing becomes imperative. **** Click here to obtain a copy of our white paper, “Improve Quality, Save Time and Money By Single Sourcing Technical Documentation and Training,” which provides a more detailed treatment of single sourcing, including methodology. |