Matt Sullivan: Bootstrapping Your Initiatives

@mattrsullivan | matt@mattrsullivan.com

F O U N D E R , T E C H C O M M T O O L S Matt Sullivan

Bootstrapping your initiatives

Question: What’s the easiest way to get budget for your

initiatives

It’s always easier to play with

“house money”

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Case Study 1: I want what he’s got!

GOAL: Create enough space in

localization budget to fund improvements in structured

documentation model

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  Nonconforming content

  Inline formatting resulting in:

  Localization of binary files, instead of XML, resulting in -  4x increase in content to localize

  What they had

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  Made adjustments to content model and related controls in the environment

  Educated authors on proper editing technique

  Started supplying structured files (content only) for localization

  What we did

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  About 30% increase in productivity

  About 50% decrease in localization expense

  And…

  What they got after pilot

Enough street cred to further improve system and drive down expenses

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Case Study 2:

The whole enchilada

GOAL: Proof of concept for migration to DITA and upload of DITA to

Adobe Experience Manager

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  Unstructured content in CMS

  Exported to generic XML

  Painfully transformed to compliant XML

  Mired in custom programming and post processing of content -  Processing of graphic icons alone was

killing production cycle

  Loaded to ECM (Enterprise content management system)

  What they had

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  Proposed blueprint project -  Start conversion -  Start templates - Train on structured authoring

  BONUS: Recognized duplication of programming effort

Technique

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  Retention of current CMS for version control

  Direct editing of XML (DITA)

  Direct upload to AEM ECM (Enterprise content management system) - Web content -  Localization (machine translation) -  PDF

  What they got after pilot

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Case Study 3:

Winning the jackpot

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  What they had

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  Followed by this

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  And this…

GOAL: Employee retention and workflow simplification

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  Asked for 1 month to produce results

  Whittled style usage from 350+ tags to 30-ish tags

  Imposed corporate branding procedures across all divisions

  Result: A dozen years later, the same base template is still in place, with consistency across documentation

  Technique

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Case Study #4

To spin, or not to spin

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  Background

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  What they had

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  And this guy

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  Until they didn’t

GOAL: Maintain updates to book and improve branding, consistency,

and organization

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  Took the long view of their docs, and addressed the holes in the system

  Worked weekly with manager to - Create consistency - Convert docs to new format

  Technique

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  1.5 years later

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  Total project cost was equivalent to previous editor’s salary

  Director of education was editing all 16 manuals simultaneously

  Formatting and organization greatly improved

  Upon completion of project, 45 hours for editor + 10 hours for director 5 hours for director

  Net gains

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  Look at your largest budget items to identify candidates for

  Identify the leaks in the current system

  Pitch (smaller) projects to fix the leaks, where savings will serve to fund larger initiatives

  Make sure that both the initial and the follow-up projects have clear and defined goals that align with management objectives

Takeaways

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