Challenges

Content migration, redesign, and a new technical writing service model – all at the same time

There needed to be a complete migration of the Help Center content to MadCap Flare – a far more flexible and robust help authoring and publishing tool. This was given added urgency by the imminent ending of Apptio’s legacy tool licenses.

Apptio wanted to start improving their content straight away. New and legacy content needed to be lighter, more user-focused, and reflect the modern cloud-app styling of their products.

With about 10-20 new releases a month, Apptio needed a technical writing service that could keep pace with product and feature update launches. The 3di service also needed to adapt to reflect the timezone differences with most of Apptio’s stakeholders based in the US, while 3di’s team was in Europe.

Solution

A design-led strategy refresh, alongside a new technical writing team

3di provided a team of technical writers using our proven workflows and tools, to ensure the Apptio product teams could have the content they needed to support their releases. Alongside, we led a strategy review that had four key components:

Delivering a multi-stream Roadmap

• Break a highly complex project down into manageable pieces.
• Track progress, and identify stalled workstreams.
• Communicate with stakeholders in a structured way, both about progress on different workstreams and about relative priorities.
• Ring-fence time for workstreams that might otherwise always slip to the bottom of the to-do list.
• Structure our project planning and day-to-day task management (in Jira).

Redesigning the content structure

• Initial migration of current content.
• Identify and prioritise the user information needs that that must be met.
• Design a repeatable structure that meets these needs.
• Identify the set of priority content, or Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
• Move existing content into the new structure, using the MVP to identify the minimum gaps to fill per product.
• Apply the new model to new products, starting with MVP.

Evolution of the Help Center frontend

Because the Help Center site was live with content being created and published almost daily, the front-end evolved over a period of 6 months to adapt to the following requirements:

• Evolving Apptio branding.
• Changing product names and structure.
• Reflecting the new content strategy.
• Improving the site’s usability.

Communicating the value to Apptio

Although we worked with a small subset of stakeholders directly, the work we were doing impacted widely across the whole business. Keeping everyone on board with the changes, and engaged with our strategy was challenging.

Our solution was to produce a series of quarterly internal communications, which we distributed via channels such as team newsletters, targeted updates to important groups of stakeholders, and publishing on Apptio’s user assistance Confluence space. These needed to be brief and highly engaging, but also informative and useful.