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LavaCon 2017 - Countering the Chaos: The Case for Cross-Department Workflows
- 2. 2 Countering the Chaos The Power of Narrative in Process Analysis and Workflow Design Bill Burns | Healthwise
- 3. Bill Burns Content Architect XML/CCMS Consultant 3
- 4. Improving process requires you to know your process Defining workflows aids cross- functional efficiency Can't automate systems or processes you can't define
- 5. 5
- 7. CREATE THE WORLD OUT OF CHAOS
- 8. 1. Give birth - Apsu and Tiamat 2. Plot murder – Apsu 3. Tip off children Tiamat 4. Plan preemptive strike – Enki 5. Declare war children – Tiamat 6. Send Marduk – Enki 7. Slay Tiamat create heaven and earth - Marduk
- 9. 1. Make light - Adonai 2. Separate water and make heaven - Adonai 3. Make dry land - Adonai 4. Grow plants - Adonai 5. Create animals - Adonai 6. Create humans - Adonai 7. Take a break - Adonai
- 10. GET KICKED OUT OF PARADISE
- 11. 1. Give spurious advice - Snake 2. Follow spurious advice - Woman 3. Do that thing – Adam 4. Make new clothes - Adam and Woman 5. Hide in the bushes – Adam and Woman 6. Show them the door – Adonai
- 12. INITIATE THE FIRST LONG-DISTANCE FOOT RACE (and drop dead)
- 13. 1. Tick off Persians - Athenians 2. Send army to punish Athens – King Darius 3. Lure the Persian army – General Miltiades 4. Spring trap – General Miltiades 5. Send messenger - General Miltiades 6. Deliver message and drop dead – Pheidippides
- 14. Modeling Processes 14 How does narrative mimic the production process? How can you leverage the tools in your rhetorical tool box to capture that thing you do?
- 16. INTERSECTIONS
- 17. Administration
- 18. WORKFLOWS IN THE WILD 18
- 19. Simple content development Hand off documentation plan Create chapter files from templates Develop content Edit document Publish
- 20. Develop content Develop content Develop content Develop content Develop content Modular content development Hand off documentation plan Create topic files from templates Edit topics Publish Develop content Develop topics Technical edit
- 21. Content Development with Reviews Develop content Develop content Develop content Develop content Develop content Hand off documentation plan Create topic files from templates Edit topics Publish Develop content Develop topics SME Review Regulatory Review Technical edit
- 22. Kanban • Trello • Smartsheet • JIRA Project management and ticketing • Wrike • JIRA • Zendesk Systems with embedded workflow • Sharepoint/Nintext • Vasont • Documentum
Editor's Notes
- Good morning! Welcome to this session, Countering the Chaos: the power of narrative in process analysis and workflow design. I’ll start this morning by defining what we mean by workflow. Then I’m going to do sort of a narrative analysis of some ancient events to show how workflow is really a narrative, a story if you will, of how things get done. We’ll talk a bit about modeling processes—that is, that is, how to pin down the discrete steps of your process. We’ll go on safari to find workflows in the wild, and finally, we’ll talk about workflow aids and automation.
- My name is Bill Burns, and I am a content architect at Healthwise, Inc., a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help people make better health decisions. We do this by providing content through our products and services to all kinds of companies and organizations, from WebMD to Kaiser Permanente. If you frequently go to hospital web sites or online medical databases, it is very likely that you have read content produced at Healthwise. Until just fairly recently, we produced all of our content out of a CMS based on Documentum using a homegrown DTD and all kinds of in-house technology to produce our various information products. Within the last few years, we’ve retooled and converted our content from a proprietary schema to DITA with a whole lot of specializations. Our process in general requires a lot of cross-departmental communication and hand-offs from one team to another. Aside from my life at Healthwise, I have worked as an applications engineer and consultant in the XML and component content management space for 15 years and as a publishing consultant and technical communicator for 24 years.
- So why do I think you should care about process analysis and workflow? Well, if you’re self-employed or work in complete isolation from others in an organization, perhaps you don’t need to care. But if your work impacts the work of others, if you contribute to a group effort to produce goods or services, then you need to understand the process that your team follows to deliver those goods or services, even if only to understand your part in it. Yes, you could just be a cog in the workings of the machine, but being ignorant of process is what will keep you there. If you want to progress and want your company to prosper, you need to understand your role in the process and its interplay with other roles in the workflow. If you are in a senior role in your organization, process improvement is just part of the game. If you want efficiency, if you want to do more with less, if you want lower cost and faster time to market, you reform your processes constantly—and to do that, you need to know your processes and establish workflows to gain those efficiencies.
- What is a workflow? This seems like a fairly elementary question. It’s a process by which something happens, right? But let’s be a bit more precise. Workflow is just not a random set events that occur during the process of something happening—like genetic mutation or photosynthesis. It’s not merely a series of sequential events, like the progression of a car accident or the changes in light and shadow that take place during the passage of time. So if we define workflow in a general sense, it is instead a series of sequential, willful acts that cause an end result to happen. And if we flesh this out more, we can say it is a business, industrial, technical, or other process in which a sequence of tasks leads to a desired end result and is repeatable. Repeatability is key, but we’re going to set that aspect aside for a moment to focus on the more basic description of workflow as a series of actions that cause an end result to happen. So we’re going to turn to a tool that many of us have in our toolbox but overlook when it comes to business process—and that tool is narrative analysis. Perhaps a bit of my background might help to illustrate what I mean. Although I work in a technical field and have even held the title “applications engineer,” I have no engineering credentials whatsoever. I have two Mas: one in English literature and another in theology with an emphasis in scripture. But I have been working in publications consulting for 20 years, and have been an XML and CCMS consultant for the last 15. How is it that I started largely as a writer and wound up doing content analysis, XML modeling, and tool integration? Well, quite simply, the tools I use to do rhetorical analysis of a literary text or a passage in scripture are the same tools I use to do a content analysis for XML. And the same tools can be put to use to analyze the action that takes place during an industrial or technical process. Narrative analysis, which is a specific type of rhetorical analysis, is essentially the assessment of action in a story, in the development of plot, and process analysis is essentially the assessment of action in a process, the development of product or service offering. So thinking of process in terms of story can be very useful for identifying the movement or action that takes place during that process.
- So that’s very simple view of what a workflow is—a narrative about how something happens, how a process takes place. You can apply narrative analysis to just about any series of actions taken during an event to define a “workflow” in this sense. What that means is that many of us who got our start in high tech after earning a liberal-arts degree very likely have the tools we need to do process analysis and workflow development. You can perform a narrative analysis and write the story of your process. You don’t need a business or engineering degree. You just need to be able to look at the story of how your products and services get from inception to delivery and describe that movement—every event that happens, every change of state, every climax and denouement—and then distinguish the critical and necessary from the things that waste time and sap resources. So that’s what we’re going to do now. We’re going to apply narrative analysis to a few historical or mythical narratives and show how they map out as workflows.
- Our first workflow is how to create the world out of chaos. But let’s tell the story first. This is from the Enuma Elish—the Babylonian Creation myth. “In the beginning there was only undifferentiated water swirling in chaos. Out of this swirl, the waters divided into sweet, fresh water, known as the god Apsu, and salty bitter water, the goddess Tiamat. Once differentiated, the union of these two entities gave birth to the younger gods. “These young gods, however, were extremely loud, troubling the sleep of Apsu at night and distracting him from his work by day.… Apsu decides to kill the younger gods. Tiamat, hearing of their plan, warns her eldest son, Enki… and he puts Apsu to sleep and kills him... Tiamat, once the supporter of the younger gods, now is enraged that they have killed her mate… “…Enki and the younger gods fight against Tiamat futilely until, from among them, emerges the champion Marduk who swears he will defeat Tiamat. Marduk… kills Tiamat by shooting her with an arrow which splits her in two; from her eyes flow the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Out of Tiamat's corpse, Marduk creates the heavens and the earth…” Mark, Joshua. “Enuma Elish—The Babylonian Epic of Creation.” Accessed 10/20/2017. Ancient History Encyclopedia. https://www.ancient.eu/article/225/enuma-elish---the-babylonian-epic-of-creation. March 2, 2011.
- Give birth to the young gods. - Apsu and Tiamat Plot to rid yourself of these noisy young gods. – Apsu Tip off your children that “Dad” is really tired of the noise and plans to kill you off. - Tiamat Plan a preemptive strike against Dad with your sibling gods – Enki Declare war on your children for killing your mate. – Tiamat Send Marduk after Tiamat. – Enki Slay Tiamat and create heaven and earth from her corpse. - Marduk
- Now, there is a variant on this theme from the book of Genesis. Adonai Elohim creates light and darkness, day and night; He separates waters above and below with a firmament; He gathered the waters together and made the dry land appear; He brought forth vegetation, seed-bearing plants, and fruit trees; He made large and small light objects in the heavens; He brings forth fauna to add to the flora; and finally He makes humankind, and then He rests. You can go right through those stories, pick out the verbs, and you’ve got the start of your process. 1. Make light. 2. Separate water and make heaven. 3. Make dry land. 4. Grow plants. 5. Create animals. 6. Create humans. 7. Take a break! Determine who does what, and you’ve got a workflow.
- Okay, narrative number two, the fall of humanity and the loss of paradise. Adonai Elohim puts man in the Garden of Eden to tend. He tells him, “Eat whatever you like, except don’t eat from that tree because you’ll die.” He creates the woman from the side of Adam. And this is where things get interesting. We don’t know what Adam has told the woman, but she doesn’t quite get the story right. She thinks it’s death even to touch the tree, which isn’t what Adam was told. So there’s your first instance of marital miscommunication. Or perhaps you could call it a game of prelapsarian telephone. Anyway, the serpent says to the woman—she doesn’t become Eve until after the fall—the serpent says, “Hey, how do you like them apples?” The woman says, “not even going there or we’ll die.” The serpent says, “Oh no, you’ll be wise like Adonai and know what’s good and what’s bad. Go ahead!” So the woman follows the serpent’s advice and takes a bite and she hands Adam the fruit. He does the same. They become aware of what they’ve just done, and now they know they’ve really stepped in it. So they try to cover themselves up with fig leaves, and they hide from Adonai when he comes looking for them. Adonai is aware that leaving them in the garden is no longer an option and expels them.
- So here’s our workflow Give spurious advice to the woman. - Snake Follow spurious advice, and invite significant other to follow spurious advice. - Woman Do that thing that Adonai Elohim specific told you not to do! – Adam Make new clothes out of fig leaves. Adam and Woman Hide in the bushes and act like nothing happened. – Adam and Woman Show Adam and the woman the door out of the garden. – Adonai. Okay, so this works with mythic narratives. How about historic events? Let’s try one.
- Okay, final example is the Battle of Marathon and the aftermath. So the Athenians helped neighboring Greeks in Ionia, which is in what would now be Turkey, to revolt against the Persians. This didn’t sit well with King Darius, who sent a massive army to conquer Greece, and in particular, to raze Athens. He sent a naval force to establish bases from which he could launch an attack on Athens. They landed at Marathon, which is where the Athenians made their stand. They were far fewer than the Persians, but they planned well and forced the Persians to rely solely on their infantry-bowmen without supporting cavalry. General Miltiades weakened the center of his force to draw the Persians in, but he strengthened the flanks. When the Persians came into attack the center, Miltiades ordered his flanks to wheel inward around the Persians and completely envelop them. After the battle, Miltiades sent the runner Pheidippides to Athens with the news. Pheidippides ran roughly 25 miles from Marathon back to Athens, announced the good news, and promptly dropped dead from exhaustion. And so the long-distance foot race that we now call the marathon was inspired by the battle and Pheidippides’ subsequent run. “The Battle of Marathon.” Wikipedia. Accessed 20 October 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marathon. 11 October 2017.
- So the process of initiating the first long-distance Olympian foot race: Tick off Persians by aiding a revolt in their colony in Ionia. - Athenians Send massive army to punish Athens and raze it to the ground. – King Darius Lure the Persian army into a plain near Marathon. – General Miltiades Spring trap and wipe out Persian infantry. – General Miltiades Send messenger back to Athens with all due speed. - General Miltiades Deliver message of victory and drop dead. – Pheidippides Very literally a terminal event.
- Now, I fudged my original description a bit for purpose of illustrating the narrative nature of a workflow. Clearly, a historical or mythic event fits the narrative structure, but it is not what we would call, strictly speaking, repeatable. But you can see how narrative is in essence process and mimics production process. Inverting that relationship, we could assert that production process mimics narrative. So while these mythic and historic events are not when we would call repeatable, they do fit the structure of process and can be described in the same terms. This gives is a very useful tool for modeling purposes. We have analysis of the “narrative structure,” so to speak, of your process—the story of how you do the thing you do. Every task, every event, every change of state that takes place to produce a good or service can be identified, as well as the individual or team responsible for performing each step of that process. While you analyze that story, you can identify those places where unnecessary things happen, where your process triggers other processes, where bottlenecks and dependencies exist, and where you might need outlets and values to redirect a process in exceptional circumstances. So what’s your process story? How does product get from concept to delivery?
- So time to pull out your rhetorical tool box. Start telling your story. Write it down, each step required to get from beginning to end. Once upon a time, a project manager wrote a documentation plan… Who initiates work? Will individuals be assigned work by some controller, or will they initiate their own work? If you’re looking at documentation processes, do you start by writing a documentation plan? Do you review product specifications? Do you wait until you are contacted by engineering or marketing? How does the ball get rolling? How do you set the schedule? Who sets it? Sometimes it helps to identify the milestones first: what are the major stages of your process? Review? Editing phases? Product beta release? Do your documentation process milestones coincide with phases in the product development process? At what points does the state of an item change? A milestone might be the first complete draft or the first SME review. Once you set the milestones, you can back up and look at your story again? How does it progress from beginning to the first milestone? What’s the first action that takes place, and who performs it? Identify each action and each performer, each movement from one performer to another. Where do individuals or teams engage with each other? Where are the hand-off points, where the work you’ve done now moves into someone else’s role? Analysis also gives you a great opportunity to clean up a bit. You might find that some tasks are being performed out of a misguided sense of tradition. This is the way we’ve always done this. The assumption, of course, is that you should continue to do it like this just because of precedence . Question your assumptions. If you can't explain why you do something for any better reason than tradition, maybe you should stop. Another thing this process analysis gives you is the opportunity to identify your dependencies. When you’re aware of your dependencies, you can design into your workflow outlets or “valves” to allow process interventions. Finally, it’s also important to assess whether there is too much rigidity in your process. Are there acceptable variations in personal work style? Can there be some flexibility in the tasks that are being performed?
- Up until now, we’ve discussed mostly single process workflows, but don’t stop there! Where are the subplots in your end-to-end process story? You need to identify processes that bridge departments to allow greater communication across organizations. Your process analysis, then, doesn’t stop with your own department. It needs to be broad enough to include related processes. You need to account for all of the intersections. Having cross-departmental workflows helps to overcome the silo mentality that is so prevalent in many companies. They enable more effective and efficient collaboration. So who intersects with your process? Who are the stakeholders elsewhere in the organization who have an interest or dependencies on your process? What processes inform yours? If you produce documentation, how does that documentation get into the product? Do you have a product fulfillment function that needs to be notified when the documentation deliverables are complete? How does your documentation get translated? Do you need to notify a localization or translation team when content is ready to be sent to translation, or if you have a tiered hand-off process, how do you work that factor into your development process? If you have an automated production process—for example, using XML transforms to produce your deliverables—how are you notified that translation is complete and production can begin? And there are many other types of review processes that might have an impact. For example, for many of the healthcare and medical device clients with whom I worked at Vasont, regulatory and legal reviews were critical processes that branched off of the document development process. It’s also good to assess the technical dependencies in your processes? Where would integration and automation benefit your process?
- Now along with all this analysis, you’ll need to determine what kind of administration is going to be necessary for establishing and maintaining your workflows. You’ll also need some kind of governance to enable you to align your strategy with other departments in your organization. Now, this is a fairly significant piece, because misalignment with other groups will just perpetuate the silos in your organization. If you don’t align with other organizations, you can wind up selecting different workflow tools, and develop overlapping or conflicting vocabularies for similar process tasks. Think of this role as the master storyteller or narrator. This role is for determining not just the story of your current process but the story of the process you could have. By the way, if you’re still not sold on the idea of using narrative analysis, I’ll let you in on a secret. Software developers do this all the time. I’ve known a few who put themselves into their code and ask questions like, “What do I want do with this piece of data? What values do I want to store in memory?” Even Agile work tasks are defined as stories, so the narrative approach speaks to techies as well as liberal-arts types.
- Now we’re going to look at a few workflows in the wild just to see how much variability we can find across industries even in simple processes.
- Okay, here’s a typical document development in more of a traditional computer software or hardware environment. You start with a project manager and a documentation plan, who hands off to the writer. Writer creates chapter files or perhaps creates just a single document file from a template. Writer develops content. Now, you notice that we’re not getting that granular. We could get into SME interviews, reading specs, working with product prototypes, and reviews. So a decision you have to make is the granularity of your task tracking. One of the benefits of breaking tasks down further is that you can assess where your resources are spending their time. If you’re using a good workflow tool, you can use that data to generate productivity reports. If you’re a small shop with just a few writers, who mostly manage their own work, too much granularity could be overkill. Okay, next step is to send the document to the editor. Again, if you’re a small group, you might edit your own work, but there still has to be a step at which editing takes place—where you focus not on generating text but refining it. If this step is performed by someone else, then it’s very likely that you will also have some iteration at this point—that is, repetition of tasks in your workflow. An editor recommends changes, and the writer determines which changes to implement. If you employ a three- or four-level editing scheme in your process—where the first round is for developmental, a second round for stylistic matter, and a third round for copy editing, you’ll have more iteration here. Finally, someone has to publish the document, and produce print file or whatever your target output is. Here too you might have some iteration. What if the line breaks come out badly or you find display anomalies. So even this simple process can have interventions and repetition.
- Okay, how does workflow change when you switch to a modular content-development process? If you switch from traditional nonstructured document development, how will a topic-based approach impact your development workflow? Well, the initial planning might look pretty similar. You might have to address more actors—perhaps a more diverse group of writers, each focused on a different area of the product: software drivers, wiring, consumable supplies. In our industry, we have some people describing medical tests, others writing behavioral change tips. The composition of these different types of information has to be part of that documentation plan, especially now that each topic might be written by a different writer. Now, as the writers begin creating new topics, is there any concern about whether they are using the right templates? If you’re using DITA, do you want everyone create plain vanilla topics, or do you have multiple content types that you need to use and enforce? Do you need to introduce a technical editor to make sure the proper topic templates are used or the proper semantics? This is the happy place where we are right now with our DITA implementation. It can be a challenge to make sure everyone is on the same page. And then we get to editing. Before you were handling off a single file or multiple chapter files. Now you could be handing off hundreds of topics. Introduce some iteration in that process, and things could get really messy fast. This is where workflow tools can make work much easier to track and manage. We’ll talk more about that in a few minutes. But something we’ve also introduced here is a really big set of dependencies. Before we can publish, all the topics have to make it through the content-development and editorial process. Along the way, writers might need to see how the different pieces play together. They might want to preview the content. They are trying to write context-free content, but that doesn’t mean context doesn’t matter. So you might need to add additional places in your process where writers can do visual proofs of their content in development.
- Now, in the industry in which my company works, we have a substantial concern for the accuracy of the information we develop and deliver. We have regular medical reviews, extensive plain-language editing, and so on. Companies that develop medical devices have extensive review processes to ensure the content is accurate, ensures safety, and protects against liability. So on top of editorial processes, subject-matter experts need to comb through the material to ensure accuracy. Regulators need to review to ensure that the documentation meets industry standards. Legal counsel needs to review to address liability. I’ve seen unbelievably complex workflows designed accounting for every step of each subprocess along the way. Each of these is like a digression or independent story in the middle of your process-development story line. Throw localization into the mix, and you have an epic on your hands. The more complex your process is and the more intersections you have with other processes, the more the complexity is expanded when you bring other locales into the mix.
- So once you’ve captured the story of your process and all of its glory, you have to model it and make it a reality. You could manage the process with Excel spreadsheets and Sharepoint sites, lots of face-to-face interactions, phone calls, emails, and such, but these methods are prone to error, hard to do collaboratively, and too porous. The details can slip too easily through the gaps. And in this age, it makes no sense to handle workflow this way. There are various technologies that can help you arrange and manage your work and the work of your teams. The simplest are individual task managers, designed around the Kanban approach to organizing tasks. These are set up as boards with lanes that represent tasks in a development process. Trello Smartsheet JIRA (Kanban) These use a board and cards for arranging work tasks. As tasks are completed, they are moved to a different lane, and follow-on tasks in later processes can then begin. There are also all kinds of project management and support-ticketing applications. These can show interrelated tasks in a process, sometimes in the form of a Gannt chart or some other kind of useful visual display of the relationship of tasks to each other. These are great for representing dependencies. JIRA has a workflow display showing the order of states that can be assigned to a task Wrike displays projects as a series of tasks in a Gannt chart. Zendesk provides great support ticket tracking Some process-lifecycle and content management systems have full-blown workflow integrations. Sharepoint with Nintext Vasont workflow and project management Documentum The difference between these systems and simple project management is that they can be used to automate processing: they kick off production processes, change metadata states, control work initiation and completion. Tools like Nintext can integrate with other Office 365 applications for notification and reporting. . Vasont’s workflow allows many kinds of business logic to be assigned to tasks to allow greater process and data control. Interestingly enough, a lot of applications are now available for fiction writers that offer similar tools for developing novels and short stories—with outlining functions, drag-and-drop storyboarding, and plot development tools. If you’re still managing your workflows using interoffice mail and Excel spreadsheets, know that novel writers and tax collectors are entering workflow heaven before you!
- Human beings are story makers, and everything we do has a story. Likewise, every product and every service begins with a story: a story about someone’s need, a story about someone’s dream, a story about someone’s adventure. Tell us your story. Thank you for your attention today.