What is Content Operations, and why do I need it?

Picture the scene – you’ve been working diligently on creating a new product. It’s been through various iterations, you’ve tested Alpha, Beta, and Zeta versions, everything has finally been signed off, and after years of work, it’s ready for launch. You’re just about to pop the champagne with your hard-working team, when someone mentions something off-hand about the documentation. You focus in. What’s wrong with it? Well, it doesn’t match the formatting of the rest of your organisation’s documentation. The font is the wrong size, and the colour scheme is slightly off. But that’s an easy fix, right?

Unfortunately, you find out it’s a symptom of a much bigger issue. As you delve deeper, you find outdated information used in a previous test version of your product, key information that’s been ‘siloed’ between different departments, and your documentation doesn’t provide the correct information to the right users at the point of access. OK, it’s not a great situation, but it’s still fixable, right? Well, yes, but it will be very difficult, as there hasn’t been investment into the people, tools, or processes needed to make quick changes to your content. It’s going to take time, money, and resources to make the necessary changes, which are the three things you’ll be in short supply of after a long product development process. And that’s not taking into account the different localized versions of your content that you’ll need for the different markets you want to launch in.

What’s the cause of this documentation nightmare? Well, this is what can happen if you don’t implement Content Operations in your organisation.

But what is Content Operations?

Content Operations is, as described by our Managing Director, Paul Ballard, as

“Content Operations (or ContentOps) is how you create and manage technical content assets related to your products; assets that deliver value for your business by reducing costs and enhancing the customer experience.” Paul Ballard, 3di CEO

Or, to put it another way, imagine your technical content is an army – in this clumsy metaphor, Technical Writers and Localization Engineers are Sergeants. The Sergeants are on the front lines, creating and directing your technical documentation at a tactical level, ensuring it can be found and used correctly. Content Operations is the General of your army, providing the grand strategy and overall objectives for your technical content, and choosing the tools and processes that the Sergeants will use to achieve these goals.

If a General makes a mistake, either with selecting the tools, processes, or personnel, this will significantly impede the Sergeant’s ability to deliver on the objectives. No matter how hard the Sergeants work, it will be an uphill battle to get your technical content to do what it needs to do. However, if the General creates a good strategy and selects the right tools and people, your success is all but assured. It will reduce friction, reduce costs and free up resources to concentrate on other tasks.

What makes Content Operations?

Content Operations can cover a wide range of things within any given organisation, but we can break these down into three distinct categories:

• People – This includes anyone involved in the creation, publishing, and dissemination of your technical content. So Technical Writers, Localization Engineers, Tools Developers, Project Managers, Subject Matter Experts, Web Developers, and even Printers will fall under the purview of Content Operations. Managing these different roles well is a key part of creating an effective Content Operations strategy.
• Processes – This refers to the processes used to create your documentation and technical content. Who writes what, how and when it is reviewed, as well as when, where, and in what format it is published, are just some of the considerations you need to make as part of your Content Operations strategy.
• Tools – This doesn’t just cover what tools you use to create documentation, but also the tools used to review your content. This includes the programs your teams use to collaborate or share information, project management tools, and translation software, just to name a few. If it’s part of your tech stack that your people use, it’s part of Content Operations.

Content Operations is essentially about effectively marshalling these three elements, ensuring that they are properly set up and maintained in your organisation, and that they work well together to create great technical content.

What are the advantages of a good Content Operations strategy?

A good Content Operations strategy takes time to plan, organise, and execute, and requires buy-in from key stakeholders across your organisation, as well as needing resources, new tools, and people to set up and maintain. So, what are the advantages of a business setting up a robust Content Operations strategy?

• It helps you identify what you do and don’t need your technical content to do, and provides a roadmap for achieving it.
• It is a means of efficiently creating technical documentation, which helps ensure that your information is correct and up to date across the board.
• It ensures you can deliver information to where your customers, partners or developers need it.
• It breaks down internal and external barriers of information, such as ‘siloed’ information between departments. 

Overall, the purpose of Content Operations services is to make it easy for people to find the technical product information they need, when and where they need it. This has many positive effects on your organisation, your end users, and their attitude towards your products, such as:

• Reducing your customers’ reliance on support teams, saving you valuable resources.
• Helping your end users troubleshoot and solve their own problems, leading to faster resolutions and increased satisfaction with your product.
• Helping your end users get the most from your products and use them more effectively or in more creative ways.
• Ensuring that each department and part of your business has the same information about your products, creating a consistent message across your whole organisation.

To find out more about the benefits of a good Content Operations strategy, read our case studies on Tekscan and Kannegiesser.

How can I implement a good Content Operations strategy?

This depends on your individual circumstances. What works for one organisation won’t necessarily work for another. For example, differences in the industry you operate in, the size and structure of your organisation, as well as external factors such as legislation governing your products, the expectations of your end-users and partners, as well as how often you need to update and change your documentation will affect which tools, processes, and expertise you’ll need to implement a good Content Operations strategy.

However, instead of embarking on a lengthy process to identify the optimal tools, processes, and staff for your organisation, you can streamline the process by working with a documentation partner that is experienced in creating Content Operations strategies. While it’s not as simple as implementing a one-size-fits-all approach for each customer, an experienced Content Operations partner will have access to and expertise in many tools, proven processes that can be customised to your needs, and access to the expertise needed to create a good Content Operations strategy.

This can shorten the painful early stages of creating a Content Operations strategy, and give you valuable insight into what tools are best suited to your needs, what processes would work effectively within your organisation, as well as giving you access to the talent and skills needed to set up and maintain a good content operations process.   

Are you ready to end your documentation nightmare?

Now, reimagine the scene I described earlier: the new product is ready, testing is complete, everything is signed off, champagne in hand, and a tired but happy team is surrounding you, ready to celebrate the launch. You stand there, poised to hear a comment about the technical content, ready to be taken down a dark documentation rabbit hole…and it doesn’t happen. Why? Because the documentation has already been taken care of. Because this time, you included localization in your Content Operations strategy, your product is ready to launch in your other target markets. This time, you’ll have the right people, tools and processes in place to manage, create and publish your documentation. This time, thanks to your good planning, the documentation is so deeply embedded in your product creation process that your team hasn’t really had to think about it. It’s just a part of your normal process of creating products. In short, it just works. This time, the launch goes smoothly, and you spend a Friday afternoon nursing a glass of champagne, enjoying some canapés, and discussing your weekend plans with your team, rather than trying to make last-minute changes to your documentation.

So, if you’ve made it this far, you hopefully now understand what Content Operations is, what elements it involves, and what the advantages of a good Content Operations strategy are for your organisation. If you need help or advice with your Content Operations strategy, or have questions on how you can best leverage your tools, implement processes, or find the right talent to help run your content creation processes, why not contact us? At 3di, we’ve helped hundreds of companies over the past two decades to communicate about their complex products, and we like to think we’re pretty good at it now.

If your documentation is suffering from outdated or siloed information, inconsistent branding, slow or inefficient updates, tools or processes that don’t suit your organisation, or a lack of purpose in what you need to achieve with your documentation, please email us at contact@3di-info.com or call us on 01483 211533. We’d be more than happy to hear from you.