4 challenges technical writers face in small companies

I was making tea with one of my technical writing colleagues a few days ago, and we were discussing the popularity of entrepreneurship and the rise of small businesses. If you are a Millennial, you undoubtedly know someone who owns a small business, watches a YouTube channel, listens to a podcast, or scrolls through Instagram accounts run by small companies. It seems that everyone has a small business or side hustle these days, with nearly a quarter of children aspiring to be entrepreneurs when they grow up. Even Jeff Bezos, head of the online juggernaut Amazon, extols the small business virtues at the heart of Amazon: “Even though it is a large company, I want it to have the heart and spirit of a small one.”

However, the conversation quickly turned back to technical writing. Small companies and organisations, in my colleague’s experience, generally face similar issues with their technical documentation. And these issues can usually be avoided with a bit of careful planning. Then I had a lightbulb moment. ‘Sounds like a good idea for a blog post’, I said. He rolled his eyes. ‘Not everything has to be a blog post, Danny’. Wrong, Richard. It definitely does.

At 3di, we’ve got a long history of working with companies of all shapes and sizes, so we have plenty of experience of solving these issues for smaller companies. In this article, I’m going to look at some recurring issues that smaller organisations have with their technical documentation, the problems that they can cause, and how to avoid or remedy them.

1. Less Capacity

A bit of an obvious one here, but smaller companies have less capacity to work with. With fewer people working on your documentation, or the people that do work on your documentation having other responsibilities to take care of, you have less capacity. This means you have fewer resources to respond to new developments, such as changes to legislation, new product launches, or new projects that need you to update or migrate your legacy content.

While small companies are often touted for their ability to be flexible and quickly adapt to change, a lack of capacity in a documentation team can hinder this. This can mean your documentation doesn’t keep pace with your releases, you struggle to manage or ensure consistency across a growing documentation set, or you don’t provide information where your customers need it most.

So, how do you avoid this? A well-thought-out content strategy can help alleviate some of the problems. A good content strategy will reduce the amount of time spent creating content by helping you implement the correct tools and content reuse models, as well as prioritise which technical content needs to be created. Also, having a trusted documentation partner that can help you respond to peaks in demand, and can be paused when required, can help you adapt to changes, reduce workload on your teams, and do so in the most efficient and cost-effective ways possible.

2. Documentation Debt

As covered by one of my colleagues in an earlier blog post, documentation debt can become a real issue for organisations of all sizes. How it affects smaller teams can be different, though. Smaller teams want to create good documentation, just like large ones; however, as mentioned earlier, they often lack the capacity to undertake larger documentation improvements or projects. This can include migrating legacy content to new formats, implementing robust content reuse and single-sourcing, or just ensuring that your documentation is available in the formats that your customers need.

This can become an issue for several reasons. Firstly, your information can become fragmented and scattered. This can lead to different departments getting information from different sources, which then leads to a situation where different people in your organisation say different things about your products. Secondly, it can lead to inconsistency in the tone and style of your documentation, making it feel disjointed and unprofessional to your end users. Thirdly, it can easily lead to your documentation becoming outdated or factually incorrect, which defeats the purpose of having documentation in the first place.

So, how can small companies address documentation debt? Well, the first step is to have an audit of your current documentation. This will help you understand the current state of the documentation, what sources of information you are drawing from, and if there are any problem areas you need to address. From here, it depends on what your most pressing issues are, but it should be easy to prioritise what tasks need to be carried out to keep your documentation in good shape or get it back on track.

3. Information Silos

This is a phenomenon we see in organisations of all sizes, but it’s in its most concentrated and dangerous form in smaller businesses. As small companies grow around the founders and early employees, these people tend to hold a lot of information in their heads about the company, its products, and how they have changed. While many organisations struggle with teams or departments siloing information, in smaller companies, that silo can be just one person. This makes these companies much more vulnerable – what happens when this person calls in sick, or needs a holiday, or even worse, decides to leave the company altogether?

So, how do you solve information siloing? Well, making sure you have the proper processes and procedures for documenting your information, especially if your company is agile and needs to keep up with new releases or changing circumstances, can help immensely. Getting people with important information to sit down and impart their wisdom to your authoring team or outsourced documentation partner is an obvious next step, but one that many overlook. It can help ensure this valuable information is documented correctly and disseminated to your employees, partners, and end-users.

4. Everyone generalises, no one specialises

Lastly, one issue that can affect companies of a smaller size is a lack of specialisation in their teams. In small companies, your staff often need to wear many hats to keep your business going – for example, for a previous employer, I’ve needed to act as a marketing executive, customer services representative, stock room boy, and one-man shipping department (and, in my own information siloing experience, after I left it took them weeks to figure out how to ship products to China – despite me leaving detailed instructions).

However, this generalisation means that no one can concentrate on the tasks that they excel at. They also have other tasks that demand their attention, so they can get easily distracted, leaving your documentation half-finished, and not getting the time and effort that it deserves.

How do you overcome this? Well, outsourcing your documentation to a technical writing partner, at least in the short term, can be a valuable first step. While it requires some initial investment, it will pay dividends in the time and stress it saves your team, not to mention the guaranteed quality of your documentation if it comes from a trusted partner. Long-term, it can help to formulate a Content Operations strategy that ensures that the right people, using the most efficient processes and tools, deal with your documentation. Again, this takes some up-front investment, but if you have multiple products, frequent releases, or anticipate frequent legislative or market changes, it can quickly pay for itself.

Can we help your business?

I hope this article has helped highlight some of the potential pitfalls and solutions to problems that small companies face when creating and managing technical documentation. While these issues aren’t necessarily unique to smaller companies, they are often exacerbated by the realities of working in one. However, there are steps, such as careful planning, auditing, implementing processes, and maybe finding a trustworthy technical writing partner (hint, hint) to help your small business when needed.

So, if you would like some help with a content audit, establishing processes, handling a one-off documentation project, or general consultancy on best practices for your business, please do get in contact with us here. We’d be more than happy to help.