This week, we covered content operations, and I have to say, I’ve bookmarked every link referenced in the reading material so I can go back and read it again. Before diving into that, however, I wanted to touch on what our textbook covers regarding assessment and design within content strategy.
Internal vs. External Competition
One point stressed in the textbook is the need to look at competitive and industry analyses when completing an assessment. Within our current project, this isn’t an option since we are working with proprietary user content. Seeing exactly how our competitors are utilizing similar content might be possible for larger projects (although I’m concerned this may actually be an ethical grey area).
However, for the purpose of this project, I’m curious to see if we might be able to use the public content as the “competitor.” If we can draw parallels or find key differences between the outward facing marketing content and the product documentation from our client, we can compare what the customer expects to see in the documentation to what they actually encounter. This comparison can be used to gauge everything from the user experience to the document design to the tone of the documents. While the purposes of each piece of content are different, they still serve the same customer.
Content Ops at Work
The presentation 7 Ways to Avoid the Biggest Failures in Content Operations was eye-opening. Recently, my workplace team consolidated tens of separate Excel workbooks into a single working document utilizing SharePoint. The consolidation process took over 8 months and I can pinpoint exactly when we encountered each of the seven failures described. Early on, I was actually responsible for expecting tech to help mitigate a lot of the problems. Eventually, it did, but only because we were forced to engage in more thoughtful communication and training. Currently, we’re struggling with governance and who is responsible for checking inconsistencies. We have a lot of great tactics, but no strategy in which to implement them.
The eventual goal is to use the spreadsheet to create a Power App within Microsoft Teams. However, we cannot move forward with putting the puzzle together until we have the edges finished. Our processes are still slow, inconsistent, and in need of optimization. With the information I’ve learned this week, I’m hopeful we can take what we have and create a strong infrastructure to build on.
Photo by Nathalia Segato on Unsplash