The Case of the Stolen Documentation
January 6th, 2010 | Posted in blog 12 Comments »
Some months ago I created a half a dozen quick reference guides for an application that would have a potential audience of thousands of users (after it cleared the beta phase). The size of the audience gave me hope that I would actually create documentation to be used by more than a handful of people outside the internal workings of my organization.
I created the guides in Adobe InDesign because it seemed to make sense for the situation — the application was relatively simple, and there were just a few roles. I crafted the layout and design carefully, branding the guides with the same color and feel as the application. I meticulously ensured each task was described with concision and accuracy, and I limited the text for each guide to one double-sided page to avoid intimidating the users. During each application update, I reviewed the guides against the new use cases and updates and made sure the instructions matched the new functionality.
As you know, I’ve given several presentations about quick reference guides and have written about them numerous times on my site, even calling quick reference guides the poetry of technical writing. These six guides were my poems. I felt a sense of pride with them and displayed them in my gallery of quick reference layouts and during team meetings.
And then one day, I received a phone call. One of the clients asked for the source files so she could update them herself (or have other designers update the source files under her department’s supervision).
The source files? I said. They’re in Adobe InDesign.
Yes, please send the originals, she said. I felt a bit offended. No one ever asked me for source files before. I wondered what it was she wanted to update that I couldn’t do. Wasn’t I close to the engineers and project managers, and therefore in a better position to update the documentation? Wasn’t I keeping it all up to date?
But I know I work for an organization, and the products I make don’t belong to me. So I zipped them up and clicked Send. For a long time, that was the last I ever saw of them.
I hung around a couple of project meetings after that, but it was clear that the documentation was now owned by someone else. I was no longer needed. Okay, I said, and moved on to other projects.
For a couple of weeks I felt upset and confused. I didn’t know if I should periodically inspect their updates, if I should close the project entirely, or what. I laid low and continued to work on other projects.
No more emails, no more requests, no more maintenance. It felt as if my documentation was stolen.
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Tags: Adobe Indesign, clients, documentation, maintenance, ownership, quick reference guides, Technical Writing, twittersphere
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Good post, Tom. I think that’s one of the hardest things that tech writers go through is letting their baby get painted another color. It is pushing us, though, to look for more collaborative ways to create content. I’m with you on the wiki train. I’m looking at a DITA to wiki solution. There’s a tool to help if you use the Confluence wiki. I haven’t tried yet, but I will within the next week. The problem I’m facing is the return trip. I want to have a collaborative environment but don’t know how to get the wiki updates back to their XML home. The conversion tool I mentioned supposedly does a wiki to docbook conversion, but the DITA component hasn’t been completed (supposedly it’s in the works). Also, have you thought about how to handle reusable content that would come from single-sourcing if you use the wiki?
Dan,
There is an open source solution for your use case. The project is called DITA2Wiki and it’s available on SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita2wiki/
Download the latest DITA2Confluence binary distribution + User Guide PDF.
Installing and importing the demo DITA content to the Confluence wiki should be easy and fast. You’ll find some user reviews here (note that they describe some configurations that have changed, so be sure to follow the instructions in the latest User Guide PDF):
* http://justwriteclick.com/2008/10/16/dita-meets-wiki-output-dita-to-wikitext/
* http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/playing-with-dita2confluence/
BTW, DITA2Confluence also supports conref (reuse in DITA), which I don’t think any other DITA-to-wiki solution does. The source text–the content being reused–is editable in the wiki output, but all reuse instances are read-only.
Other nifty features include transforming metadata to wiki labels (useful for compatibility information and other categorization).
If you have any questions, ping me at lisa dot dyer at gmail dot com. I can advise you on the round-trip aspects as well.
Cheers,
- lisa
Lisa, thanks for adding the comment about the DITA2wiki plugin. I’ve seen you demo the plugin and have always been very impressed. My main hangup in adopting the plugin is that I’m using Mediawiki rather than Confluence, and I don’t have my content structured in DITA. But I can see how this plugin would be incredibly helpful were a few variables in my situation different.
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the kind words:)
Some good news regarding DITA2Wiki support for other wikis; a Maven plugin of the DITA2Confluence tool is under development, to be distributed as part of the Maven plugin of DITA OT.
This work creates the appropriate architecture for supporting any wiki, enabling the DITA community to “plug in” their own import functions. GA is expected end of February.
I’m hoping that someone will be inspired to contribute an import function for MediaWiki:)
Cheers,
- lisa
Interesting post. The documentation department I work in has a policy of never releasing the source files. This ensures quality (I’m thinking back to your previous post http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2009/04/23/can-others-do-your-job/) and prevents unfinished, unchecked and possibly incorrect (yet company branded and therefore liability-carrying) documentation being “leaked” to customers.
We are always being asked for the source files (including by customers!) but the answer is always no.
Haitham, thanks for your comment. Retaining the source files seems like a good strategy for a number of reasons — you protect yourself from brand misrepresentation, you maintain your role as the designated producer of the information, and you can keep a tight hold on style and structure. The only weakness is the lack of collaboration. If the SMEs have info you need, collaboration can be extremely helpful. If you already have the info, collaboration is unnecessary.
Tom,
I have been reading your blog on and off for a few years and this is my first comment. Since I write some manuals myself I have also been stuck at the same situation, both on the stealing side and the stolen side. You are absolutely spot-on about the ownership thing – we should at least be lucky that we are dealing with more background stuff (manuals) than copies on the spotlight (web copies, packages, so on). I think one good thing in those situation is that nobody is trying to make things worse – they all believe they are doing the best for the outcome, even if it is identical with his personal preference. I am thinking open, collaborative editing might be the way thanks to you. We may have InDesign as a web-based app soon, which will make things more easier.
Tom,
Go here and read:
http://www.scottburnham.com/files/Scott-Burnham-Hacking-Design-2009.pdf
Now think about users taking over the information you produce vis-à-vis what Burnham says about hacking as “overcoming the limitations of an existing object, service or system which was set for one purpose, and finding an access point, intellectually or physically, where its original function can be expanded, altered, or improved to serve a new purpose or solve a problem”.
Do you see any of that happening with the documentation you hand over, either now or in future?
Interesting post Tom, keep up the good posts!
I used to get very proprietary about my manuals and as 100% of what I do is for clients I can’t exactly demurely decline when they want their source files. Two things happened in 2009 that changed my opinion on releasing files to clients. The first was a disaster for my client – a large restaurant chain. They had an internal person do their operations guide and then allowed it to get 5 years out of date. When they wanted me to create new material and incorporate the old material the only thing available were pdf copies – they didn’t even have the ability to update their own recipes. This client had to go through the trouble of doing a large search for the long-gone employee to see if they had the files since they did not want to pay to convert the pdf files. The second instance was a new client. I happily turned over their source files and they promptly totally blew them up by trying to change the formatting and not understanding the underlying structure. I now am on a document maintenance retainer with them. Sometimes letting your client make their own mistakes is actually beneficial to their understanding that documentation is not in the category of glorified-typing-pool product. I’ve gone to building in a teaching component into my project prices and I’ll spend time with my clients teaching them how to maintain their own docs.
Our department doesn’t create documentation for external clients, but we have had a couple of online Help systems “hijacked” by well-meaning but poorly trained software engineers. Reading between the lines, I think those engineers were trying to bypass the standard procedure for having TechComm write the online Help (read as: software project manager didn’t budget for it). I’d never seen a well-written online Help system get turned back into an acronym-filled, menu-descriptive specifications document before!
[...] this year, Tom Johnson in his blog “I’d Rather Be Writing” discussed the issue of documentation ownership. He had recently handed over the source files of several manuals he had done to an internal client [...]