To meet the demand for content, do you take a “peanut butter” approach and spread your resources evenly – but thinly – across the whole product? Or do you grease the squeakiest wheel, which means you neglect a wheel that’s more vital to the business? Either way, outside forces dictate how you’ll use your resources. Soon you’ll have a lot of mediocre content that doesn’t represent your team’s value. And that makes it hard to get headcount and funding.

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Getting Dragged Along?
Lisa Hultman
Start Charting Your Team’s Course with an Investment Model
Senior Manager, Information Development

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About our doc
• Public site
• DITA-based
• New release 2x a year
• About 10K topics/release

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The problem
• Info Dev was reactive
• Perception of Info Dev planning was poor
– Execs thought we were “peanut buttering”
– Dev teams didn’t understand how we made resource decisions
Result:
• Demands for us to document everything equally
• No increase in headcount due to perception that we didn’t
use current heads wisely

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The solution

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Why create an investment model
• Show where we’re under-resourced – what areas are not covered with current
headcount
• Ensure both sides – development and the doc team – agree on what will and won’t be
covered
• Open a dialogue about creative solutions to cover gaps
• Demonstrate that we know our business – we base decisions on data

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How we got started
• Got buy in to be included in executive reviews
• Set up meetings with ALL development teams
• Created questionnaire to open conversation

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Sample questions
Priority:
• Must have
ü Nice to have
Type of development:
• New
ü Enhancement
• Bug fix
Content required:
ü Release notes
• In-product help
ü Guided setup (in-product)
• API reference
ü Concept/task/reference documentation
Audience:
ü Admin
• Developer
• Business User
Business value (check all that apply):
• Large customer base (existing)
ü Emerging product
ü Strategic
Business purpose: What problem does the feature solve?

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What did we consider
• Growth of development team
• Scope of development effort for the release
• “Documentation debt”
• Number of customers/adoption rate
• Business value

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Release Plan Summary – Business Unit Comparison
720
504
335 351 298
145 183
114
288
107
35 45
40
52
52
398
47
95 40
70
97 20
5
BUSINESS UNIT A BUSINESS UNIT B BUSINESS UNIT C BUSINESS UNIT D BUSINESS UNIT E BUSINESS UNIT F BUSINESS UNIT G BUSINESS UNIT H
Must Have Doc Debt Nice to Have
Must Have: 2650
Doc Debt: 619
Nice to Have: 772
Total: 4041
Resources Available: 3000

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What really happened
• Difficult to convince dev managers and PMs to meet with us
• Executives didn’t show up to our executive review
• Hard to say no to mid-release requests that weren’t agreed upon in planning
• Dev teams used “Must Have” and “Nice to Have” interchangeably
But on the positive side:
• Our research drove additional headcount

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Iterating on our approach
• Socialized up front
• Conducted mid-release check-ins
• Accepted churn
• Merged our planning slides with dev teams’

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How the investment model has helped
• Empowers writers to say no
• Strengthens relationships, creates partnerships between docs and dev
• Highlights all possible options for content delivery
• Gets Info Dev involved early

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What can you do to get started
• Add data to your decision making process
• Ask for justification – don’t just grease the squeaky wheel
• Normalize involving docs in release planning

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Questions?

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Thank You!