Your migration journey is going to involve fear, frustration, skepticism, exhaustion, and maybe even dysentery. We learned a lot about humanity while migrating our Markdown-in-Github docs to DITA. We’ll share our experience, describe our lessons learned, and help you prepare for the emotional aspects of your own content migration projects. You’ll learn about : What’s the state of your team culture and values? Are they up for this? What happens when people who are good at their job are temporarily bad at it? Why is Engineering mad at us? What things can you do to lift the team up when everyone is stressed out and generally peeved? What if a key person quits? What if anyone quits? We succeeded! Why don’t we feel elated?

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6. docs.puppet.com
1 2
puppet.com/docs
3

9. N
ov
2015
-decided
to
do
this
O
ct2015
Lavacon
Sum
m
er2016
-chose
vendor,approach
Vendor research
Fall2016
-acquired
toolset
Jul2017
-started
putting
PE
docs
in
easyD
ITA
O
ct2017
-shipped
PE
docs
-300
pages,1250
topics
Team training
Architecture project
Content prep work
2016 2017 2018
Jan
2018
-started
putting
O
S
docs
in
easyD
ITA
“Migration”
Pipeline setup
More “migration”
Architecture, pipeline evolution
Today

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13. “It feels like DITA automates
attention to detail, which
annoyed me, because that’s
something I bring to the team.”
- Mindy
“If a tool makes the userfeel stupid, that is becausethe tool is bad.”
- Jean
“I was just starting to know what I was
doing and understand what’s expected of
me. And now we’re going to change
everything. I felt a lot of resistance and
unhappiness about that.”
- Mindy

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20. “[Migration work] felt busy
and like I was getting work
done… It’s part of my job.
I'm on this team and this is
what we're doing. We're
migrating.”
- Isaac
“Not taking it super seriously helped.
It’s just a job at the end of the day, and
eventually we’ll get this figured out.”
- Melissa
“I had to step away. I need to go do another
thing for awhile. Then I'd come back to it
with a clear head and see something really
obvious that I'd missed before.”
-
Jean
“I would have enjoyed [team building fun] more if I
hadn’t already been overwhelmed… Maybe build in
a little more recovery time between learning a lot
of stuff, interacting with everyone, lots of change.”
- Mindy
“Find it productive. Start something and
finish it. Get it 100% done. And I find it quite
therapeutic, and I listen to music.”
- Claire

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“If you aren’t using all the benefits
DITA offers, all that work hardly
seems worth it.”
- Isaac

24. “It's a good achievement to have as
a team. And you can learn to use
two different tools instead of one.”
- Claire
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