Chapter 9. Analyzing the content lifecycle
Within your organization, content is developed in many different ways by many different people and by many different departments. Development may follow a predefined process or it may not, and if there is an established process, it may differ from department to department.
You’re probably asking yourself, “I’m concerned about content strategy—why do I need to be concerned about process?” To implement a unified content strategy, you need unified processes so that everyone involved in creating, developing, storing, and publishing content does it the same way, or at minimum, is able to interact effectively and share content. Without a good handle on your content processes the best content strategy in the world will fail.
Think about a theater production. There is the front of stage that your audience sees. It needs to be an amazing experience that draws them in, keeps them entertained, and provides a fulfilling experience. But if an actor is late getting on stage or forgets his lines, or when the curtain goes up in the second act and a chair that was in the scene in the first act isn’t there, or one of the characters now has red hair instead of brown, this is a sure sign of disorganization and your audience is going to begin to question the quality of the presentation. There’s a discontinuity and you’ve introduced uncertainty into the environment you’ve created. Your content and the way you choose to deliver it (Web, mobile, print) is your front of stage. Your content lifecycle is your back stage. Without a well-controlled back stage, the performance will be flawed.
To understand where you should focus your efforts, though, you need to examine your content lifecycle and any issues associated with it. Where your organization currently has challenges, you need to improve the processes and technology to eliminate these issues. Where processes and technology are working well, you want to see if they will continue to work effectively in the new strategy and if so, incorporate them. Identifying the issues will help you determine the scope and required functionality of your unified content strategy, define the tools selection criteria, and determine which processes you must redesign or create.
Identifying your content lifecycle
Content moves through various phases of development, such as creation, review, management, and delivery. These phases are collectively known as the “content lifecycle” (see Figure 9.1).
Figure 9.1. Content lifecycle.
Although your organization may have different phases, or call them by different names, these are the most common. To identify the content lifecycle in your organization, look at how content is developed for one area or across the enterprise. Is it the same across all content creation areas, or does it vary from area to area? How effective is the content lifecycle in each area?
This section poses questions about your content lifecycle and its effectiveness. To answer these questions, you’ll need to interview all the players (everyone involved in the content lifecycle).
Identifying the players, processes, and issues
The previous section poses many questions that you should ask as you analyze your content lifecycle. To answer these questions, you interview all the players (everyone involved in the content lifecycle). This section provides sample interview questions. Developing content involves not only many different phases, but also many players with differing skills participating in many steps over an extended period of time. These players bring different insights into the issues related to the content lifecycle, so it’s important to interview them to learn their different perspectives.
Depending on the area of the organization to be supported (for example, marketing versus product content) or by the type of organization, the players may change.
Typical players include:
• Customers (internal and external)
• Authors or content contributors
• Acquisitions or product development
• Design
• Editors
• Information technology
• Learning development and instructional design
• Production
• Reviewers
• Sales and marketing
• Translation/localization
Customers
Your content is used by many different customers, both internal and external. Internal customers are those within your organization who use content to assist them in doing their jobs, making decisions, and supporting the customer. External customers are those outside your organization (for example, customers, stakeholders) who use content to get information about your company (for example, what products and services you provide, how to use your products or services, how to contact you).
Customer interviews are critical to understanding how the intended audiences use and access your content, and to determining what changes should be made to accommodate them. Customer interviews can help you realize how similar groups of people need similar types of information and whether the content they use contains it or not. Customer interviews can also tell you how they prefer to receive information.
For more information on gathering information about your customers refer to Chapter 7, “What does your customer really need?”
Sample internal customer questions
• What is your role?
• What challenges do you face in getting your job done?
• How do you receive content now? How would you prefer to receive information?
• What content do you use to help you in your job?
• Has the content been designed to help you meet the challenges of your job, that is, can you find and access the right content when you need it? If so, what is it about the content that helps you?
• What types of information do you look for in content? How does that information help you do your job better?
• What do you like best about the content you use? What do you like least? Why?
• What suggestions can you make to improve the content?
Sample external customer questions
• What is your role?
• What content do you use most?
• What content do you use least?
• What is missing from our content?
• What do you like most about the content? What do you like least about the content?
• How do you use our content? Does it help you accomplish your tasks or make decisions?
• How do you receive content now? How would you prefer to receive content?
• What is the most challenging aspect of daily work? Can content help make this easier? If so, how?
• What suggestions can you make to improve the content?
Authors or content contributors questions
Questions related to the authoring processes are critical to uncovering issues related to the writing and management of content, issues that may hinder the usefulness of the content, its timeliness, and its overlap with other content. For example, do authors have the right tools? Are time frames realistic? Where do authors get the information they need? Are your authors also the subject matter experts (SMEs) or do they rely on SMEs to get the right information?
You may have internal authors, external authors, or a combination of both. We sometimes find that there’s resistance or pushback when we ask to speak to external authors. If you find this, at minimum make sure you understand what templates and guidelines they’re provided with and get an understanding of how well external authors follow those guidelines.
Looking at global authoring requirements is also very important. If you distribute content globally, global authors may have similar or very different requirements and issues.
Sample internal author questions
Questions for internal authors or content contributors might include something like the following:
1. What is your role? What are your responsibilities?
2. What are your current content creation processes? Which processes are effective? Which processes are ineffective? Explain.
3. Who do you work with during the content creation process? How effective are these relationships?
4. How do you collect information to write your content? How well does this work?
5. How do you currently handle sign-off or review?
6. How do you handle document control? Version control? Access control?
7. How do you create content (for example, are there stylesheets or templates)?
8. Do you reuse content? In what way? How effective is it?
9. What tools do you use? How well do they meet your needs?
Sample external author questions
Questions for external authors or content contributors might include something like the following:
• How do you create content (for example, are there stylesheets or templates)?
• What is the process you follow to create your content? How effective is this process?
• How much guidance do you get to help you create your content? Is there too much? Too little? How much guidance would you like?
• What suggestions could you make to improve the process between you and [company X]?
• What tools do you use? How well do they meet your needs?
Sample global author questions
Questions for global authors might include something like the following:
• What is your role? What are your responsibilities?
• What are your current content creation processes? Which processes are effective? Which processes are ineffective? Explain.
• Who do you work with during the content creation process? How effective are these relationships?
• How do you collect information to write your content? How well does this work?
• How do you currently handle sign-off or review?
• How do you handle document control? Version control? Access control?
• How do you create content (for example, are there stylesheets or templates)?
• Do you reuse content? In what way? How effective is it?
• Do you use the same tools as authors in other locations? If so, how well do the tools work for you? If not, which tools do you use? Why don’t you use the same tools as other authors?
Acquisitions or product development
If content is your business, you’ll have an acquisitions or product development role in your company. It’s important to talk to people in your acquisitions or product development department because they start the process by identifying new opportunities, seeking out authors or existing content materials, acquiring the rights to these materials, determining what information products will be produced, and setting the required timeline. They are critical to your content lifecycle.
Sample acquisitions or product development questions
Questions for acquisitions or product development might include something like the following:
• What is your role? What are your responsibilities?
• Please describe your customers and markets, including how your customers want to interact with your content.
• How do you determine what type of product you will acquire and deliver? What factors help to make that decision?
• What are the major challenges you face in your job?
• What impact does the current publishing workflow have on your job?
Design
Design can consist of website visual design, art, photography, and rich media design and creation. Design can also include print, eBooks, mobile, or apps. Design provides the visuals and interaction for your content. Design may be grouped in one area of your organization or spread across multiple areas.
Sample design questions
Questions for design might include something like the following:
• What is your role? What are your responsibilities?
• What types of material do you design?
• At a top level, describe your processes. Which processes are effective? Which processes are ineffective?
• Where or who do you get your requirements from?
• Who determines the format of the asset (photography, line art, video)? What determines the “level of quality” (resolution, scalability) of the asset?
• Is the asset designed or created with reuse in mind (for example, multiple formats for different platforms)?
• How do you currently manage the assets that you’ve created?
• Do you add metadata to the asset when storing it? Is there a consistent format or rules for adding metadata?
• What tools do you use? How well do they meet your needs?
Editors
You may or may not have an editorial role. If you’re developing product content, there’s often no formal editorial role, but there should be! If you’re responsible for web content you will have an editor, and if you’re a publisher you’re likely to have a whole slew of editors (acquisition editor, developmental editor, copy editor).
Sample editorial questions
Questions for editors might include something like the following:
• What is your role? What are your responsibilities?
• What is the current editorial process? Which processes are effective? Which processes are ineffective?
• What standards are the materials expected to meet?
• How do you communicate your requirements to authors?
• How do you receive content for edits?
• How do you mark it up?
• How do you return it to authors once reviewed?
• How do you track changes?
• What tools do you use? How well do they meet your needs?
Information technology
The information technology (IT) group plays an important role in selecting, managing, and deploying technology throughout the organization. Sometimes there’s friction between the content groups and IT, where each group feels that the other simply doesn’t understand them. Maybe that’s true, but we suggest that you ignore them at your peril. Ignoring IT can result in the following:
• Technology that is isolated (siloed) from the rest of the company
• The need for your own technical resources to manage your technology
• Increased costs
Our preference is to open up the communication lines to determine if IT can support the technology you are considering using, and if they can what standards they want met. However, there are situations where IT manages only the enterprise-wide tools such as Microsoft Office, and department-specific tools are not supported.
Don’t forget to ask everyone in the content lifecycle what tools they use and how effective they are. Tools can be a significant stumbling block for success. If people can’t use them, if they slow them down, or if they truly hate them, productivity will be significantly compromised. Questions about tools are included with the sample questions for each type of interview.
Sample IT questions
Questions for IT might include something like the following:
• What is your role? What are your responsibilities?
• Are there existing content management systems in the company? What are they? Who uses them? How well do they work?
• Do you support any department-specific tools?
• Have you developed any custom content management or publishing systems?
• Why was the system developed? What corporate needs was the system designed to meet?
• How well is the current system working? What works well? What problems do you have with the current system(s)?
• What functionality do you require that your current system does not provide?
• Is there a standard for tools and databases? If so, what is it and why is it a standard? What is the process for changing an existing standard where appropriate or adopting a second, alternative standard?
• Are there any specific product requirements (for example, Microsoft versus UNIX server)?
• What is the process for adopting new technology?
Learning development and instructional design
Many organizations develop learning materials to support their products and services. While some organizations develop learning materials exclusively, most develop learning materials in conjunction with documentation and support materials, or possibly books and eBooks. There is often a lot of opportunity to reuse content, either between courses or from materials developed elsewhere in the organization and learning materials.
Sample learning development and instructional design questions
Questions for learning development and instructional design might include something like the following:
• What is your role? What are your responsibilities?
• What type(s) of learning materials do you produce?
• What are your current content creation and management processes? Which processes are effective? Which processes are ineffective?
• How do you currently handle sign-off or review?
• How do you handle document control? Version control? Access control?
• Do you reuse content? In what way? How effective is it?
• What tools do you use? How well do the tools support your development tasks?
• How are your materials created (for example, are there stylesheets or templates)?
• What impact does the current publishing workflow have on your job?
Production
In many organizations, authors are responsible for publishing their own content. In other organizations, there are production staff whose sole task is to publish content to paper or the Web. Production staff may accept content from multiple authors and format the content appropriately for the specified media. In yet others, writers may work with SMEs to publish content.
Sample production questions
Questions for external production might include something like the following:
• What are the current publication processes? Which processes are effective? Which processes are ineffective? Why are these processes effective or ineffective?
• What are the problems or frustrations you face in producing content?
• How do you handle document control? Version control? Access control? Distribution control?
• How are documents created (for example, are there stylesheets or templates)?
• What tools do you use? How well do they meet your needs?
Reviewers
The review and approval process is a phase in the content lifecycle that can be either a roadblock or an enabler for the delivery of content. There are many different types of reviewers, including SMEs, management, quality assurance, customer support, compliance/standards groups, or legal. Each reviewer will look for different things in the content and may have different issues. To cover all the bases, make sure you interview representative reviewers from each type.
Sample reviewer questions
Questions for reviewers might include something like the following:
• What is the current review processes? Which processes are effective? Which processes are ineffective? What kinds of information do you look for when reviewing content?
• What standards are the materials expected to meet?
• How do you communicate your requirements to authors?
• What are the major issues that you identify?
• What tools do you use? How well do they meet your needs?
Sales and marketing
Sales and marketing deal with customers all the time and often use corporate content in the development of their own materials. They are often the first to hear customer requirements.
Sample sales and marketing questions
Questions for sales and marketing might include something like the following:
• What is your role?
• Please describe your customers and markets, including how your customers want to interact with your content.
• Describe at a top level how you develop a marketing and sales campaign for products.
• What are the major challenges you face in your job?
• How do you collaborate with acquisitions or product development on new product ideas and decisions?
• What impact does the current publishing workflow have on your job?
• What tools do you use? How well do they meet your needs?
Translation/localization
Translation/localization involves translating content and modifying it to meet local language and cultural requirements. Questions related to translation/localization are important in understanding how content is provided to translation services, how effective the translation process is, and what issues arise in translating content in a timely and cost-effective manner.
Sample translation/localization questions
Questions for translation/localization might include something like the following:
• What are the current translation/localization processes? Which processes are effective? Which processes are ineffective?
• What are the problems or frustrations you face in translating content?
• Do you have written standards and guidelines for authors to prepare content for translation?
• How do you handle document control? Version control? Access control? Distribution control?
• What tools do you use? How well do they meet your needs?
• Do you use/have a translation memory system?
Summary
The various phases in your content lifecycle need to be identified and detailed to identify areas for improvement. Recognizing the processes and issues will help you plan and define your unified content strategy. For example, where your organization currently has issues, you need to improve the processes and technology to eliminate these issues. Where processes and technology are working well, you want to incorporate them into the new systems and processes where appropriate. Identifying the issues will help you determine the scope and functionality of your unified content strategy, define the criteria for selection of appropriate tools, and define the processes that must be redesigned or created.