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Julie A. Bradbury
Group Director, Knowledge Transfer Organization
Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (Recently retired)
In his book, The Tipping Point (Little Brown 2000), Malcolm
Gladwell explains how little changes can have big effects.
The Cadence Design Content Collaboration Initiative is a
little change that is beginning to have a positive effect on
content development at our company. It's not the epidemic
that Gladwell describes, but it may be on the way to
becoming one. Content Collaboration is a grass-roots
response to the business need that asks groups to do more,
more quickly, with fewer resources.
What Is It?
Content Collaboration is a system that purposefully brings
together content-creators from various business departments.
In our electronic design automation company, content
creating groups include product engineering, customer
training, customer support, field support, and technical
publications, to name a few. Each group creates content at
different points in the product-development life cycle for
various internal and external customers. While different in
presentation, the information can usually be repurposed for
most customers, initially by leveraging what has already
been researched and created by another group.
Content collaboration is a team effort. As the groups begin
collaborating across the development cycle and outside their
organization boundaries, they start noticing gains in one or
more of these areas:
- saving research time
- increasing technical review efficiency
- reusing training labs
- improving (reducing) the cycle time of content development
- increasing content reuse and repurposing
- increasing quality
What Are the Group Dynamics?
One of the benefits of content collaboration is in the
development of working relationships with other
cross-functional team members. Once the immediate project is
done, those helping relationships continue.
—Julie Thomas, Publications Director, Integrated Circuit
Design at Cadence Design Systems
In Content Collaboration pilots, each group reviews the
timeline for creating and delivering their content and looks
for opportunities to interact. They work out answers to
these and other tactical questions:
- What's the best way to share information as it is
created—a repository, a Web site?
- What information can be reused to avoid rework?
- Who can best review content for technical accuracy in the
most efficient way?
- What labs can be recycled from field training into
customer training?
- What information is redundant and easily found in other
groups' deliverables?
The teams that invested in collaboration have shared their
experiences with other business groups, and the practice is
spreading. A year ago, we started with one collaboration
pilot and now there are six active groups in various parts
of the business.
What Situations Invite Collaboration?
Pooling resources, even across organizations, can help you
step up to increased productivity demands, but you may have
to go against the classic business expectations that reward
individual contributions. Rewards come from leveraging the
work of others. Yes, there will be modifications, but the
emphasis is building on what others have done or using their
expertise to enrich what you are developing.
In their recent book, Content Critical (Prentice 2002),
Gerry McGovern and Rob Norton cite environments that are
conducive to collaboration. While their comments relate to
producing one deliverable, these comments can also be
applied to writing that crosses several disciplines and
multiple deliverables. They say,
"Collaborative writing works best where
- there is a major content creation task at hand that
ideally demands the input of multiple disciplines
- the content job can be broken up into clearly defined
segments that can be allocated to individual authors
However, just allocating pieces of work to people is not
collaboration. Unless there is strong interaction between
authors and an overall sense of direction and styles is
jointly established, you will not achieve the true
potential of collaboration.
- there are tight publication deadlines, which mean that a
number of authors are more likely to deliver a quality
result on time
- there is a well thought-through set of processes to
facilitate collaboration."
(McGovern and Norton, Content Critical, 2002, p. 95)
How Do You Start a Team of Content Collaborators?
My business partner (Bill Piexoto, Director, Cadence
Education Services) and I acted as catalysts by convening
content collaboration kickoff meetings for all content
creators in each business unit. In The Tipping Point, we'd
be called connectors.
- We identified an executive sponsor and included him or her
in the initial meetings.
- We brought along the leaders from the early pilots to talk
about their groups and their implementation.
- We invited the attendees to form their own Content
Collaboration team.
- To move forward, the new team had to appoint a point
person to handle communication and facilitate meetings.
- They also had to identify one product to act as their
pilot effort; new products are often good choices. With a
new product, there is no working environment to change,
and the product is often a priority. All groups are
beginning with a fresh starting point, which makes it more
advantageous for collaboration.
Fortunately, Content Collaboration is evolutionary, and each
team will have its special practices, but the concept is the
same—if you collaborate, you reap productivity and quality
gains.
What Business Results Can You Get?
Savings in time and resources, richer information, content
reuse and repurposing, and improved communication are
positive outcomes.
Content Collaboration results in productivity improvements:
- 6 weeks saved in training course development time
(~$16,800). The flow guides were developed and used by
documentation, training, and customer support for
consistency and as training aids in the classroom.
- 9 weeks saved in course development time (~$25,200). Lab
and lecture development was coordinated across functional
groups.
Content Collaboration results in increased quality:
- Publications, customer support, and education services
closed 77 PCRs (trouble reports) and used consistent
terminology and formats across the product content.
- Publications leveraged customer support expertise for
targeted technical reviews that matched expertise with
particular documentation chapters. Segmenting the
technical reviews was a wise use of time and technical
knowledge. The review feedback was richer because focused
participation allowed our technical experts to provide
feedback where they were most knowledgeable.
Contact Information
To get answers to your questions and any updates, contact
Bill Piexoto, Director, Education Services, Cadence Design
Systems, Inc., 408 944-7570, or email him at
.
References
The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown and Company
Boston, MA: 2000
ISBN: 0316316962
Content Critical
Gerry McGovern and Rob Norton
Financial Times Prentice Hall
Great Britain, UK: 2002
ISBN: 027365604X
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