Developing DITA Expertise Across Your Virtual Team. Martha Morgan Information Architect, NetApp June 4, 2009

Transcription

1 Developing DITA Expertise Across Your Virtual Team Martha Morgan Information Architect, NetApp June 4, 2009

2 About the presenter Martha Morgan is the Architect for NetApp s Information Engineering department Over 50 writers in Sunnyvale, RTP, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Bangalore Five editors in Sunnyvale and Bangalore Three Tools Specialists in Sunnyvale Three Production Specialists in Sunnyvale and Bangalore NetApp began migrating content to DITA in 2006 As of April 2009, about half of NetApp s product documentation content is in DITA (over 11,000 topics so far) Almost all of NetApp s DITA leadership is in Sunnyvale, but more than half of the DITA users are somewhere else 2

3 Challenge addressed in this presentation You ve put your virtual team through DITA training You ve built out your DITA tools infrastructure Authors in all locations are transforming DITA topics successfully But when you look closely, the DITA quality of the content just isn t that great What can you do? 3

4 Recommendations Make it easier for staff in remote offices to ask questions, provide feedback, and participate in infrastructure development Invest in DITA education Give priority to developing the DITA skills of leaders in each office Develop shared criteria for evaluating DITA skills 4

5 Make it easier to ask questions, provide feedback, and participate in infrastructure distribution list for DITA questions Let writers do most of the answering Intervene only if someone gives bad advice or if no one has responded after a long wait Create searchable archive Teaches writers to seek out the expertise of their peers Real-time meetings of the DITA community Gets writers talking who are geographically or organizationally far apart Helps avoid development of distinct DITA writing styles in different areas (bad for reuse) Requires some flexibility to accommodate all time zones Don t use a conference room; make everyone a remote caller 5

6 Make it easier to ask questions, provide feedback, and participate in infrastructure Architecture team of representatives from different groups, including Editorial and Tools Gives remote DITA writers a venue for bringing up issues Develops standards, best practices, and processes for DITA writers Cross-department reality check for architecture decisions Provides status to DITA leadership on how teams are coping with the transition to DITA In-house DITA wiki Links to standards, content models, meeting minutes, training modules, the DITA spec, etc. Indexed for better findability Don t repeat answers point people to the wiki! 6

7 Invest in DITA Education Repeatable, stand-alone training modules At NetApp, our training modules are simple presentations with voiceovers and accompanied by hands-on exercises nothing fancy Available anytime to DITA writers at all locations Helps writers refresh their understanding of DITA concepts DITA code reviews Based on code-inspection techniques used by software engineers Purpose is to have a team of your peers identify DITA coding defects, not editorial defects Emphasis on getting reviewers from other teams or offices Only a few topics can be reviewed in a single meeting Total cost of review team prep time can be daunting

8 Invest in DITA Education DITA Content Reviews One reviewer s look at about 50 pages of DITA-based output from one project See the DITA-based content as the customers will Reviewer fills out reusable tracking spreadsheet for identifying DITA defects: Description of defect How defect was detected (i.e., how can I tell there s a DITA defect from looking at the output?) Why the defect is a problem for customers or for other writers Locations of the defect in the reviewed content Meets with project team to go over defect list Emphasizes correctly structured content 8

9 Develop DITA skills of leaders As you build the collaborative working environment that DITA requires, writers rely more and more on their peers for information Writers with questions tend to go to the leaders (official or social) of their group Given a choice between asking a grumpy expert or a novice who is very approachable and pleasant Danger: Undertrained leaders in remote offices who give bad recommendations Give priority to training the people who are most likely to be asked questions by their peers 9

10 Shared criteria for DITA development Challenge: How to evaluate DITA skills of writers in different teams and locations with different managers? Shared criteria for evaluating writers DITA skills 1. Challenged: Unable to work in DITA without significant assistance. 2. Developing: Can generate valid DITA output with occasional assistance. Can develop content that is reusable by other projects if coaching is available. 3. Satisfactory: Can generate correctly coded topic-based content, usually without assistance. 4. Superior: Develops topic-based, easily reusable content. Coaches developing DITA writers. 5. Advisory: Develops content that can be a model to other writers. Drives the development of NetApp DITA standards and models. After initial training, everyone starts at level 2. 10

11 Q&A 11