Our Mission:

Fig. Typical Program for moving to structured information using DITA.

ROI (Return on Investment)

WOLFF & Associates can help you identify the size of the opportunity by building an ROI model to project when the breakeven point will be reached. We can help you identify what are the direct and indirect contributors are, and look at the impact of your program for internal and cross functional savings. Improving your documentation reduces development and translation/localization costs, but it can also drive down support costs and liability claims. High quality, accurate product information can improve customer satisfaction and productivity. Building structured, reusable information can help your customers succeed and reduce operating costs by as much as 70%. 

Customer Analysis

Many organizations discover that mission critical information is often missing or that procedures have neglected critical steps required for end users to be successful with their products. Just like you're marketing efforts, customer documentation must be targeted to be relevant. Building effective product documentation requires more than adding markup to existing documentation, it requires identifying who are the customers, what customer types exist, what are their information requirements, and how to best serve and deliver information throughout the end user's product lifecycle. WOLFF & Associates can help you create customer usability studies and surveys and develop a customer model to design your information architecture. We are committed to helping you create customer focused information. We work with you to define your product lifecycles and the customer types that require information about your products. From the identified customer types we then can define customer prototypes and their goals.

Documentation Strategy

Many organizations  continue building the same documents for ages, even though technology has evolved, products have evolved, and customers roles have changed. Each customer type may have different information requirements. With an agreed upon set of customer types, and their personas and goals captured, we can assess if your documentation strategy is the right one.  Building a documentation strategy insures that the right information is packaged and delivered in the right form to be most effective for each stage of the product's lifecycle. This is a tops-down customer driven approach to product documentation.

Information Modeling

Information Modeling (or Data Modeling) is where the real design process begins. At WOLFF & Associates, we  use the information captured in the customer analysis and task analysis to build a task based information model that is based on either the DITA or S1000D open standards. This insures that your content assets are managed in a non-proprietary format, allowing your business to leverage industry best practices and state of the art technology as it evolves over time. Topic based models such as DITA and S1000D help insure that your information is organized and packaged to address specific customer information needs. At this stage we specify  document and information types and how they are to be applied consistently for your products. We document which elements should be used, under what circumstances, and also identify which elements are not to be used. We also define any extensions to the open source model such as "Specializations" used to address business specific structural requirements and industry/domain specific nomenclature. Then we implement the DTD's (Document Type Definitions) or XSD's used by the authoring and content management applications to enforce document structure.

Format Analysis & Development

Does what you publish represents your business? Is it consistent? How does it represent your brand? With structured content, stylesheets can be created that automate desktop publishing. If your organization is spending a great deal of money on localization, then you are probably aware that 40%-50% of your localization cost is attributed to desktop publishing of the individual languages. With open standard based XSLT and XSL-FO based style sheets you can use rendering applications to produce your documents as both PDF and HMTL web pages or HTML Help in a matter of minutes, saving you thousands (or millions) of dollars. At WOLFF & Associates, we work with you to create a format specification document that defines how each of the elements will be formatted and placed on the page. Then we build the stylesheets according the agreed upon specification.

Process & Role Definition

Moving to structured information development often requires the creation of a new development, localization and delivery process for producing technical publications. With the high degree of reuse, it is often valuable to redefine and create new roles within the team. These can include Content Reuse Planner and Information Architect. We create swim lanes to help you evaluate your current and future processes, and work with you to define what parts of the process need to be managed within your CCMS (Component Content Management System).

CMS Requirements & Selection

We track the industry's leading Component Content Management System (CCMS) applications, assessing their features and capabilities continually. (See the Whitepapers & Presentations section for access to past CCMS presentations and the WOLFF CMS pocket guide). We help you understand industry speak, define your CMS application requirements, and meet with prospective vendors to choose the best application for your business. We are vendor independent, so we can help insure that you are getting the very best solution for your investment dollar.

We recommend a nine step process for choosing a CCMS

 
Fig. Recommended CCMS selection process

CMS Implementation, Piloting and Training

After selecting a CCMS, WOLFF & Associates can support implementing your CCMS. You should always implement and pilot a CCMS before making a purchase. This insures that the prospective vendor's sales team is committed to your success and allows you to experience first hand how the new system will work with your content and your new process. Organizations can discover during the pilot phase if  the system is  really what they had expected. WOLFF & Associates can help you with implementation logistics, developing test cases for the pilot and provide information and process specific training to support change management.

Program Expansion

We believe in creating success on step at a time. Start by building a strategy and understanding customer information needs. Next, develop a document type including the information model and stylesheets to use in testing your processes, applications and language requirements. Usually customers pilot with a fairly complex document type that fully exercises their structured publication requirements. We then expand the program to other document types and product documentation. Keep testing at every stage of the program, and always have a fallback risk management plan when business critical deliveries are involved. By implementing your program in steps,  your success is built in at each stage, and you see the results and receive finalized deliverables throughout the implementation process. Set realistic expectations for moving to structured documentation. Typical programs require one to two years to implement depending on the variety and number of documents, and the number of organizations involved in the implementation and design. Most companies start seeing large annualized savings of fifty to seventy percent in the third year after a complete cycle of documentation has been delivered and localized in the new DITA structure.

Legacy Content Conversion

For organizations, if their information was not created as a set of specific topics, information will often require significant re-writes to be implemented as reusable topics. This is due to a number of factors, including:

• Monolithic documents are not topic oriented, often written as a stream of consciousness.
• Many different styles of writing may exist, documents have evolved over years.
• Books consists of chapters and sections will often contain transitional text.
• Different types of content  may be mixed within the same section.
• Inter-topic dependencies such as cross references and links exist within the content.

Though some automation or mass tagging can be done to initially bring legacy content into the new structure, it is often not practical to expect that the content itself will not need to be re-written. You may elect not to migrate legacy content, and just develop all future documents in DITA, or invest to bring your most business critical documents over to the new structure. We can help you move small or large volumes of information into DITA.

Project Management

When you get ready to put it all together, we can help you manage the analysis and implementation logistics for program schedule and budget. We can work with your project lead or act as a project lead or project manager.