Tamara Bailey is a senior technical communicator with extensive training and experience in usability, technical information management, and training. She is a former president of our chapter, and presently works as the Leader, Technical Communications at PMC-Sierra, a leading designer of semiconductors for the communications and enterprise storage industries.
On March 15, 2011, Tamara shared how her team transitioned several hundred technical content providers from authoring Microsoft Word documents to managing XML topics. This move enforced a more structured writing process—which allowed the company to take full advantage of a workplace where up to half of the workers were subject matters experts—and helped her team to seize opportunities for content reuse, as authors now had access to a library of existing information to supplement the work they wrote themselves.
The Technical Communications team at PMC-Sierra is small, consisting of her manager, two technical communicators, and an XML/Java system developer. Tamara pointed out that it would have been impossible to keep up with the writing of all original content, due to the sheer volume the company produced. The real value her team offered was found in developing the policies and processes surrounding the acquisition, development, management, and presentation of the information as an asset.
Managing the Transition
During this presentation, Tamara avoided preaching to the choir about the benefits of structured writing. Instead, she focused on the particular challenges her team faced with regards to training and coaching the subject matter experts at PMC-Sierra through the transition from Microsoft Word to XMLmind and Bluestream XDocs. The team saw that all change must be managed: While reusing existing content may prove to be more efficient, an organization must design robust systems and workflow in order to realize those benefits.
The model for managing this change was divided into five steps:
- Analyze
- Design
- Develop
- Implement
- Evaluate
Author Collaboration
The speed at which the authors embraced the new tools and methodologies was directly impacted by their understanding of the technology and what it could do. Tamara used this to break down the users into various categories, especially the skeptics and early adopters. These workers could be placed in specific roles to assist, and sometimes even drive the process. For instance, the more skeptical workers could be used as testers, and the early adopters could provide new, creative ways to use the content. Her team waited for systems and processes to become more stable and concrete before introducing the more resistant users.
The ideas presented in Tamara’s presentation were useful, not only for the process of migrating to structured writing but in overall change management. Many times, I have observed team members present excellent ideas that were never made policy or practice because they were not able to create buy in. I also hate to say it but there were probably some good ideas that I personally passed on, simply because someone wasn’t able to get me to buy in either.
Tamara has kindly provided a PDF (2mb) of the presentation slides: stccwcpres_migrating_structmarch2011.pdf
