Don't lose control of your product documentation
By Ron Byrne
This
is a cautionary tale about how not to manage your product manuals.
Company
X is a medium size company manufacturing a large range of products for
both commercial and domestic use both in Australia and an expanding number
of other countries. They
carry a large inventory of product manuals that are distributed in the
boxes with their products and direct to sales and service agents.
In
recent years they gave their support documentation production needs to an
outside agency for design and production. A Company X staff member was
responsible for liaison and ordering.
This arrangement worked well, until the staff member left the
company leaving no written or verbal instructions about production of the
documentation.
Shortly
afterwards, there arose the need to update documents for a range of
products because of design changes. Another staff member contacted the
agency only to discover that there had been changes of staff there too,
with the result that the documents in question could not be found. Without
the company’s knowledge, the agency had given yet another independent
person the task of producing some of the content and that person had moved
on and no longer had any interest in the matter.
After
much searching, no complete set of files for the documents could be found
either within Company X, or within the agency. Many fragments were found -
but not the right ones. Some of the fragments found were created by the
independent person using an application that no-one else had knowledge of
or access to. As if this wasn’t enough, it turned out that the
requirement was for updates to, and production of, no less than 29
discrete manuals covering:
-
Four product variants within the range.
-
Three types of manual targetting three disparate audience groups (user, installation and service).
-
Three countries. Covering minor installation and certification differences.
Faced with this chaotic situation, the
company approached HCi. We peeled back the layers of history to reveal a
litany of inadequacies in the documents themselves as well as in the
document production process. These
included.
-
The reproduction of manuals was ad hoc and poorly controlled. It was discovered that some manuals issued were photocopies of printed originals held on file. This gave poor reproduction quality.
-
There were simply too many manuals to keep track of.
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Like the reproductions, the updating of manuals was ad hoc and poorly controlled. When both the engineering and marketing departments wanted to make changes, they were not coordinated and therefore often conflicted.
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The content of manuals was not user or task focussed. For example the user guide and the installation manual were the same document and included in the box with the product. In many cases the installation technician held his own copy and never referred to the copy in the box. The box copy was often discarded so that the user never saw it.
-
There was no consistency in the look and feel of the documents.
After
this investigation, HCi rewrote the documentation for the company’s
flagship product range as a sample of what the documents should have been
like.
The
re-write brought about the following improvements:
-
The 29 manuals were reduced to a straightforward set of three documents; User Guide, Installation Manual and Service Manual, each covering the entire product range and all national variations.
-
These new manuals were audience and task focussed for the three disparate audience groups
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The use of appropriate language and approach for each audience group
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A new and coherent set of electronic copies now existed on which a regime of document control and production could be based.
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The documents were developed in Word using common templates agreed with the Marketing department.
HCI
has helped Company X learn the following lessons:
-
The Production department should also accept responsibility for the reproduction of all documents. Printing documentation for distribution with a product is really part of the product manufacturing process and should be controlled in the same way. It is all right to give the printing to an outside agency as long as the company retains control of the source material.
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The Engineering (Design) department should be responsible for the technical content of all documentation. This includes all technical illustrations, wiring diagrams, schematics, etc.
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The Marketing department should be responsible for the look and feel of the manuals and for the marketing content. For this they need to draw on external copywriters, designers and others for its document content and design. Engineering needs to draw on external technical writing resources.
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All changes should be fed to the production department where a competent operator thoroughly familiar with the computer application(s) used should make the changes.
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Document sets for a product range should be rationalised to reduce the inventory of manuals held. This brings many benefits: the reproduction process is simplified – there is less confusion about which manual variant needs to be printed: the packaging process is simplified – there is less confusion about which manual variant needs to be packed: the reproduction costs are reduced; there are significant savings in being able to print manuals in greater quantities, these savings can mean, for example, that a higher quality reproduction technique (such as colour) can become feasible. In other words don’t have 29 documents when you can have three.
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There should be clearly written procedures covering the maintenance and production of documents and these procedures should form part of the manufacturing process.
First published August 2003
This article may be reproduced only with the permission of HCi (email HCi ). Copyright HCi, 2003.
