How can technical writers streamline their workflow?

In practice, most teams spend a large amount of time on tasks that are never on the project plan (reformatting screenshots, chasing after an engineer who changed a parameter three sprints ago, rewriting the same installation prerequisites for the 5th version of a product). The following structural changes reduce the time spent on these tasks rather than trying to get people to work faster.

Audit where the hours actually go before changing anything

Improving the workflow at the wrong stage is not very useful. First, track a whole release cycle for a typical product. Then, categorize all the time spent there in detail. With a bit of effort, you’ll be able to separate the time you spent writing from the time others spent reviewing your work, from the time you spent reformatting the same information for different output formats, etc.

For teams with these characteristics, the largest proportion of their time is spent in reviewing content or reformatting information already written for another purpose. Getting faster at writing is not going to solve your problem because the problem is not that you can’t write fast enough. The problem is that six people are reviewing the same document and commenting on it simultaneously.

What counts as rework

When we do track the rework, it is good to define it precisely in terms of the efforts involved. We call rework all changes made to information that already was available when we started to write that piece of text (intake), and all changes that were correct in the first place but were re-written for other destinations (reuse).

Make structured authoring do the work it is designed for

Structured authoring only brings sufficient value if your content has multiple instances of similar structure, which get distributed to multiple output channels. One PDF a year is not worth the overhead of a structured approach to documentation. But shipping variants of products to different geographic regions, with support sites, release notes, and in-product help text all largely based on overlapping sets of material, that is a different story.

Structuring content into a set of topics such as task information (prerequisites, steps, results), reference information (tables, parameter definitions), and concepts (why something exists) allows writers to work with repeatable content structures (or shapes) that reviewers can easily follow and search for. This greatly simplifies the content’s reuse across multiple destinations such as external Help Centers and release notes.

Choosing your level of structure

Design reuse rules before building a content library

Reuse in documentation is notoriously hard to get right and most of the reasons for failure relate to poor governance rather than bad choice of tool. Ensure that a governing framework for reuse is in place and then populate the repository with all the fragments that are reused by your writers.

• Assign a single owner to every reusable component, with named reviewers for changes.
• Reuse only content that is genuinely identical, not merely similar. Near-matches belong in conditional text or separate topics.
• Keep variables for product names, version numbers, and URLs so a rebrand is a configuration change.
• Record where each component is used, and require an impact check before any edit is published.

Boilerplate (e.g., safety notices, licensing information, standard prerequisites) is often the best starting point for structured authoring because it already is verbatim and has very little editorial risk while providing the biggest immediate returns.

Shorten the review loop instead of extending the deadline

Reviewing can take up a lot of time on documentation teams. This can be spread by ensuring that each reviewer is assigned to a specific area of the documentation, and that they review topics one at a time rather than the entire manual. Set a fixed time period for reviewers to comment and if no comments are received within this time then it can be assumed that they have no comments to make. Further, accuracy, compliance and style should all be checked for by different people in a sequence.

1. Request subject matter review on the draft topic only, with specific questions attached.
2. Resolve technical comments and lock the factual content.
3. Run editorial and terminology checks, ideally automated against a style rule set.
4. Send to compliance or legal only once content is otherwise final.

Automate the checks that machines do better

A good rule-checker can spot many problems with content, including issues with terminology, excessive use of passive-voice construction, cross-references, and missing alt text for images. It is worth settling on technical writing software that supports a set of predefined rules which can be applied automatically on commit or even on save of content-files.

Treat the pipeline as a product you maintain

Turn your processes into your build process. Keep source files in your version control system and have your installation, Help and release notes generated by your scripts for your build process. Verify your work on a staging environment. This way writers can fix things quickly in minutes.

Review your processes (especially workflow improvements) about every 3 months and always compare against your earlier measurements for the same main categories of effort. And, yes, things do inevitably degrade over time, it’s just easier to catch problems with current products than it would be with products that are no longer current.

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