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Mark Baker
Director, Communications, OmniMark Technologies
Often, one of the overlooked consequences of moving to
single sourcing is the change it implies in the way the work
of a documentation group is organized. A typical
documentation group (at least in my experience) is organized
to undertake a series of projects. Each project is
essentially independent of every other, independently
funded, and independently staffed. A documentation group is
a pool of resources from which project leaders and project
staff are drawn as needed.
Most documentation groups have ongoing responsibility for a
product line or a set of product lines. They maintain
libraries of documentation from previous versions, which
they draw on as a starting point for new documentation
projects when a new version of a product is being created.
The care and maintenance of this library is important to the
group, but it is not the group's main concern. Work is not
organized around the maintenance of the library. Work is
organized around individual documentation projects.
In a single-sourcing environment, however, the material that
goes into an individual document is drawn, in whole or in
part, from a shared collection of information components:
the "single source" from which all documentation is built.
This changes, or should change, the focus of the group's
activities. All individual projects now draw from the single
source. All new material that is created goes into the
single source. (If it doesn't, the source ceases to be
single and the system breaks down.) The group must now be
organized to exercise permanent stewardship of this central
resource. Projects to create particular documentation sets
from this resource are secondary, and they call on services
provided by the central repository. Work must now be
organized around the maintenance of the single source.
The switch from project-oriented organization and planning
to ongoing resource maintenance can be hard to accomplish,
especially if you don't anticipate it. However, making the
switch is essential to the long-term success of the
single-sourcing system. Often, getting out an individual
project, or meeting nice-to-have requirements for an
individual documentation set, can most easily be achieved by
breaking the single-sourcing rules. It will be easy to do,
and the immediate consequences will be minimal. If the
writers and editors have not internalized that the
maintenance of the single source is the primary task of the
group, breaking the rules will happen over and over again.
The consequence of breaking the rules is that the
single-sourcing system begins to break down. Exceptions
accumulate and sources begin to diverge. After a while, the
single-sourcing process no longer works or requires so much
manual intervention that it ceases to deliver any cost or
time savings.
If you are embarking on a single-sourcing project,
therefore, make sure that everyone involved, from managers
to writers, editors, and designers, understand that the work
of the group will now center on the care and maintenance of
the single-source system. Also, make sure that product
management understands and buys into this idea. Make sure
that they understand the consequences of single sourcing
when they create their requirements. Also, ensure that they
understand what the central responsibility of the group now
is, and that they are willing to fund the group accordingly.
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