Many technical information groups feel overwhelmed by the evolving demands being placed on them by forces both inside and outside of their organization, but don’t have a solid idea of how to address these demands. In keeping up with the day-to-day, there is no time to be strategic.
A system checkup and roadmap by JANA can help your group solve both of those issues.
Checkup
A system checkup is a high-level analysis of where you’re at, where you want to be and how to bridge the gap.
Typically executed over a three- to four-week time period, the system checkup defines the processes and strategies for building a comprehensive, customized solution, and identifies actionable items that you can implement — including specific tasks that address your immediate challenges and long-term needs.
Because JANA keeps up with the latest technologies, data models, trends, industry benchmarks and best practices, we can help your organization quickly get your bearings and strategically work towards a more efficient and productive technical information operation.
Roadmap
While a system checkup is the high-level analysis of your technical information situation, the system roadmap is a deeper dive into your situation to provide a more complete picture of your status, your goals, and what needs to happen to position your technical information process for success — now and in the foreseeable future.
JANA’s roadmap is a gameplan that you can use to become more strategic in managing your technical information and solidify your company as an industry leader.
Workshop
The system roadmap typically starts with an on-site workshop. The workshop includes interviewing your management team and technical writers in an effort to:
- Understand your current situation and processes
Beyond a technical understanding of where you are at, we’re looking to correlate these challenges to business needs that have both tangible and intangible impacts to cost, revenue, customer satisfaction, liability and other aspects that are important to the business. - Understand your constraints
As an organization that creates and revises hundreds of thousands of pages of technical information every year, JANA understands better than anyone that money is only part of the challenge. It is critical to discover and define the limitations within your organization that can impact or restrict positive change. While financial restrictions are important, there are any number of other constraints that have to be considered before positive change can occur. These might include:
- – the culture of the organization beyond technical publications
- – the pace of change that can be accommodated within the department
- – how customers (internal and external) are expecting (or demanding) to access technical information
- – risk tolerance
- – other criteria that should be (but often aren’t) considered
- Understand your short-term and long-term goals
Building goals and meaningful milestones into the improvement process is a critical component of creating a solution that addresses and fulfills all of your business needs. While everyone comes up with vague goals of reducing costs, improving efficiency and having ‘better’ pubs, JANA will identify goals that will not only address each of the established organizational objectives, but can also be accurately measured. Metrics are a key component of measuring the success of any project, and the building of a system roadmap is no different.
Once JANA has a solid understanding of where you’re at, where you need to be, and the constraints involved, we develop a roadmap to bridge the current with the future. Depending on your short-term needs and long-term goals, the plan may involve the incorporation of new technologies, and/or recommendations on revising existing business processes (or building new ones).
In addition, we develop solid Return On Investment (ROI) models to help you justify the project based on reality — not fantasy.
Roadmapping for Mergers, Acquisitions and Reorganizations
When several disparate technical information departments need to be aligned to a single vision, the system roadmap process can be utilized to ensure arrival at a common goal. Although the specific roadmap for a given department may be unique, the objective is to have a singular purpose and destination for the organization’s technical information process. As part of your due diligence or budget request process, JANA can identify a high-level roadmap to estimate the time and resources required to reach your desired end-state.
Implementing a single technical information system across multiple business units offers many advantages:
- Tangible benefits
- Reduce costs through reuse or modification of existing content (vs. creation from scratch)
- Reduce time to market by automating approval and publishing processes
- Intangible benefits
- Mitigate legal liabilities by presenting more consistent content — especially warnings and cautions
- Enhance corporate branding by presenting a consistent ‘look and feel’
