Marketplace demands are forcing technical writing teams to create compelling and effective customer documentation for high-tech and consumer products at the same time they’re under increasing pressure to reduce costs and improve time to market.
But smart technical writing teams can turn these challenges into an opportunity to help their organization gain a competitive edge by identifying new ways to cut costs, speed cycle times and streamline workflows with single-source technologies.
Technical writing teams can follow three approaches to help their organizations improve their competitive standing:
Technical writing teams need to take the lead in helping the organization deploy new content related technologies that support single-source publishing. By separating content from format, XML offers a number of advantages in document production and information reuse. Organizations that choose tools that support XML will be poised to realize significant efficiencies, especially when they streamline workflows.
The same approach extends to information standards like DITA. By dividing content into small, self-contained topics that can be reused in different deliverables, DITA also saves time in DTD/schema creation. DITA and single-source publishing technologies also ease the process of creating content for new delivery methods, including on-line customer support.
Many companies are moving production and research and development to offshore centers. Technical writing managers need to respond to this trend by finding fresh approaches that enable their organization to save costs, while also making sure that some writing resources are based close to where the work is being performed. One way is to adopt an approach that blends internal and external resources. Technical writing teams that learn how to base staff closer to headquarters while also pushing content development closer to offshore locations – will deliver cost savings and better documentation, improving efficiency and productivity.
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