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Keeping your content consistent gets harder as your team grows. Without a clear process, quality can slip and writers get frustrated. A solid content development workflow is the key to scaling successfully. It’s the blueprint for creating great content development, every single time. We’ve spent years refining our own process for our Heretto documentation. And now, we're sharing our internal guide with you. You can download the DITA files or PDF from our Jorsek GitHub: https://github.com/Jorsek/jorsek-cdg. Take what you need to build a process that works for you.
Typically, style guides, information models, and strategies are each standalone documents. Instead of having three large, laser-focused documents, we’ve invested some time into simplifying our Style Guide, Information Model, and Strategies to contain only what’s essential to Jorsek’s content needs.Then, we compiled those into a single document that guides and informs all our documentation: the Jorsek Content Development Guide. In the Content Development Guide, we’ve focused on the principles that underlie our style guidelines, information model, and strategies docs. Focusing on the principles and trimming the details made it possible for us to combine all three into a single, manageable document that acts as the central guide for all of our content development needs.Of course, our Content Development Guide includes some guidelines that are narrow and specific to Jorsek.
But because we shaved off as much inessential material as possible, we think the Content Development Guide is a good starting point for any organization that’s transitioning to structured authoring or is still in the early stages of implementation. The principles in our Content Development Guide can serve as the backbone for your structured content development needs.
The Business Case for a Content Development Workflow
We’ve observed quite a few different types of customer needs around documentation and the creation and implementation of a content strategy. Some customers are transitioning to DITA from an unstructured environment. Some are just getting started in their content production. Some are both. And still, others are DITA and structured authoring experts. But all of them have in common the need for a content development guide, a substantive document to act as a unifier for an authoring team.For many of our customers, the first step in adopting structured authoring is to convert their existing content into DITA. Once they’ve cleared that hurdle, they often launch into writing and reusing chunks of content. Sometimes these organizations have well-formulated guidelines for how to reuse content, which writing style to use, and how they should structure their content.
Sometimes not. Either way, devoting time upfront to develop your organization’s information model, style guide, and DITA-use strategies will save you from common documentation mishaps that require labor-intensive effort to sort out. For example, having an established linking strategy can promote link-usage that’s consistent and easy to manage. Not establishing a linking strategy ahead of time can lead to authors using links in unmanageable ways. This leads to broken links and the painstaking task of resolving them.The same applies to writing styles. If there aren’t guidelines around grammar usage, the content that individual authors write will each take on the tone of voice of those individual authors.
This, in turn, results in an inconsistent company voice projected through your documentation. In many writing contexts this is fine. But technical documentation is about delivering content that aids the user with some task or operation or explains a concept to the user. Given the context of technical communication, an inconsistent tone of voice can lead to user-confusion and thus frustration for users reading your documentation.So, we hope our Content Development Guide can help your organization achieve its documentation goals. Enjoy it. And if you have any feedback, we’d love to hear from you. Note: In our next post, we’ll provide some strategies for implementing some of the principles in our Content Development Guide.
What is a Content Workflow?
A content workflow is the series of steps your team follows to get a piece of content from an initial idea to its final, published state. Think of it as a roadmap that clearly defines who does what, what tasks need to be completed, and in what order. For technical documentation teams, this isn't just a nice-to-have; it's the engine that drives consistency and quality. A solid workflow ensures that every piece of content—from a single topic to an entire manual—goes through the same essential stages of creation, review, and approval. This structured approach removes the guesswork and ambiguity that can lead to errors, delays, and inconsistent information for your end-users.
Without a defined process, teams often operate in a state of organized chaos. Deadlines get missed, subject matter expert (SME) reviews become bottlenecks, and no one is quite sure what the next step is. A content workflow brings order to this process. It creates a predictable, repeatable system that everyone on the team understands and can follow. This system is crucial for maintaining high standards, especially when dealing with complex product information where accuracy is paramount. It transforms content creation from a reactive, often stressful activity into a proactive, manageable operation that supports your business goals and, most importantly, helps your customers succeed.
Why a Documented Workflow is Non-Negotiable
Having a workflow is one thing, but documenting it is what makes it powerful. A documented workflow acts as a single source of truth for your entire content team, ensuring everyone is aligned on processes and expectations. When your workflow is clearly written down, it becomes an invaluable tool for onboarding new writers, training team members, and maintaining consistency as your team grows. It eliminates the "I didn't know I was supposed to do that" moments and replaces them with clear, actionable steps. This clarity is the foundation for producing high-quality, accurate, and consistent content on a reliable schedule.
Furthermore, a documented process is essential for continuous improvement. You can't fix what you can't see. By mapping out each step, you can easily identify bottlenecks, redundancies, and areas for optimization. Is the legal review taking too long? Is there confusion about who gives the final approval? A documented workflow brings these issues to the surface, allowing you to address them systematically. This strategic approach ensures your content creation process doesn't just run smoothly; it evolves and becomes more efficient over time, allowing your team to focus on creating valuable content rather than wrestling with a broken process.
Common Challenges a Content Workflow Solves
A well-designed content workflow does more than just organize tasks; it directly solves some of the most persistent problems that plague content teams. From communication breakdowns to missed deadlines, these challenges can derail projects and diminish the quality of your documentation. By implementing a structured process, you create a framework that anticipates these issues and provides clear solutions. This proactive approach helps your team operate more efficiently, reduce friction between contributors, and ultimately produce better content that meets the needs of your audience. Let's look at a few of the most common challenges a workflow can resolve.
Breaking Down Team Silos
In many organizations, technical writers, SMEs, editors, and legal teams work in their own separate worlds. This isolation, or "siloing," leads to poor communication, redundant work, and inconsistent messaging. A content workflow breaks down these walls by creating a shared, transparent process. When everyone can see where a piece of content is in the lifecycle—from drafting to SME review to final publication—it fosters collaboration and shared ownership. Everyone understands their role in the larger process and how their contribution affects the next person in the chain, leading to a more cohesive and effective team effort.
Identifying Bottlenecks in Approvals
One of the most common complaints in content creation is the review and approval cycle. Content gets stuck waiting for feedback from an SME, a manager, or the legal department, and deadlines slip. A content workflow makes this process transparent by assigning specific review tasks to individuals and setting clear timelines. If a piece of content is stalled, it's immediately obvious where the bottleneck is and who is responsible. This visibility allows project managers to follow up proactively and keep the process moving, ensuring that reviews are completed efficiently without sacrificing quality or accuracy.
Automating Manual Tasks
Content production involves many repetitive, manual tasks: notifying the next person in the review chain, converting files, or pushing content to a publishing destination. These small tasks add up, consuming valuable time that writers and editors could be spending on higher-value work. A modern content workflow, especially when supported by a Component Content Management System (CCMS), can automate many of these steps. Automated notifications, scheduled publishing, and streamlined handoffs reduce the administrative burden on your team, minimize the risk of human error, and accelerate the entire content lifecycle from start to finish.
Scaling Content Production
As your company grows, so does the demand for content. Trying to scale production without a defined process is a recipe for disaster. Quality drops, inconsistencies multiply, and the team quickly becomes overwhelmed. A documented workflow provides a scalable blueprint for content creation. It allows you to onboard new team members quickly and efficiently because the process is already defined. With a repeatable system in place, you can increase your content output to meet growing business needs without compromising the quality and consistency that your customers rely on. This makes your content operation a scalable asset, not a production bottleneck.
The Key Stages of a Content Workflow
Every piece of content, whether it's a simple FAQ or a complex installation guide, goes through a lifecycle. A content workflow organizes this lifecycle into distinct stages, each with its own set of tasks and objectives. While the specifics can vary between teams, most workflows follow a general pattern of pre-production, production, and post-production. Understanding these key stages helps you build a comprehensive process that covers all the necessary steps for creating high-quality technical documentation. This structure ensures that nothing falls through the cracks, from initial planning to final publication and beyond.
Pre-production: Strategy and Ideation
This is where every content project begins. The pre-production stage is all about planning and strategy. Before any writing happens, your team needs to define the goals of the content. Who is the audience? What problem are we trying to solve for them? What key information must be included? This stage involves activities like brainstorming with stakeholders, conducting research, defining the scope, and creating a detailed outline. A strong pre-production phase sets the project up for success by ensuring that everyone is aligned on the objectives and that the content is strategically designed to meet user needs from the very beginning.
Production: Creation and Authoring
Once the plan is in place, it's time to move into the production stage. This is where the content is actually written, designed, and assembled. For technical documentation teams, this involves more than just writing text. It includes creating diagrams, capturing screenshots, developing code samples, and ensuring all the components come together to form a clear and cohesive whole. The focus during this stage is on creating accurate, clear, and helpful content that adheres to your company's style guide and information model. This is the most labor-intensive part of the workflow, where the raw ideas from the pre-production stage are transformed into tangible assets.
Writing and Designing in a Structured Environment
For teams using a structured authoring approach like DITA XML, the production stage is highly methodical. Instead of writing long, monolithic documents, authors create modular, reusable topics. Each topic is a self-contained chunk of information that can be mixed and matched to build different deliverables. This component-based approach, managed within a CCMS, ensures consistency and makes content easier to update and translate. The workflow at this stage includes tasks like creating new topics, tagging content with metadata, and assembling topics into maps that define the structure of the final output, streamlining the entire content creation process.
Post-production: Review and Publishing
After the initial draft is complete, the content enters the post-production stage. This phase is all about quality control and distribution. It typically starts with a series of reviews, including a technical review by SMEs to check for accuracy, an editorial review for style and grammar, and potentially a legal or compliance review. Once all feedback has been incorporated and the content is approved, it moves to the final steps: translation (if applicable) and publishing. The workflow defines who needs to review the content, in what order, and how the final version is delivered to customers, whether it's on a help portal, as a PDF, or within a product's UI.
How to Build Your Content Workflow Step-by-Step
Creating a content workflow from scratch might seem like a huge task, but you can make it manageable by breaking it down into a series of logical steps. The goal is to build a process that is tailored to your team's specific needs, tools, and goals. It's not about finding a one-size-fits-all template but about thoughtfully designing a system that makes sense for your organization. By following a structured approach to building your workflow, you can create a durable, effective process that eliminates confusion, improves efficiency, and helps your team produce its best work consistently.
1. Analyze Your Current Process
Before you can build a better workflow, you need to understand your current one—even if it's informal and undocumented. Start by mapping out how content currently gets made. Talk to your writers, editors, and SMEs to understand their steps, pain points, and frustrations. What works well? Where do things get stuck? This audit will give you a clear baseline and highlight the biggest opportunities for improvement. Look for recurring bottlenecks, areas of confusion, and tasks that consume too much time. This initial analysis is crucial for ensuring your new workflow solves real problems.
2. List and Organize All Tasks
Next, create a comprehensive list of every single task involved in your content lifecycle, from the initial request to the final publication and maintenance. Be as granular as possible. Include everything from "drafting the initial topic" and "creating screenshots" to "sending for SME review" and "checking for broken links." Once you have your master list, group these tasks into the logical stages of your workflow: pre-production, production, and post-production. This exercise helps ensure that no steps are overlooked and provides the basic building blocks for your new, structured process.
3. Assign Roles and Responsibilities
A workflow is useless if no one knows who is supposed to do what. For each task you've listed, clearly define the roles and responsibilities. Who is the author responsible for creating the content? Who are the required reviewers for technical accuracy and editorial style? Who has the final authority to approve the content for publication? Defining these roles eliminates ambiguity and ensures accountability at every step. This clarity is especially important in the review cycle, as it prevents content from getting stuck in limbo because everyone thinks someone else is supposed to take the next step.
4. Choose the Right Tools to Support Your Team
Your workflow is only as effective as the tools you use to manage it. For technical documentation teams, trying to manage a complex workflow with spreadsheets and email is inefficient and prone to error. You need a central platform that can support your entire process. This is where a purpose-built system for managing structured content becomes essential. The right tool should provide features for authoring, review, version control, translation management, and publishing, all in one place. It should support your workflow, not force you to work around its limitations.
Using a CCMS to Manage Complex Workflows
A Component Content Management System (CCMS) is specifically designed to handle the complexities of technical documentation workflows. A platform like Heretto provides a centralized environment where you can define and enforce your workflow from start to finish. You can create custom review cycles, automatically assign tasks, and track the status of every piece of content in real time. Because a CCMS is built around structured, reusable content, it also streamlines the authoring and publishing process. By integrating your workflow directly into your content platform, you create a seamless, efficient system that reduces manual effort and gives you complete control over your content operations.
5. Customize and Document Your Process
Now it's time to bring everything together. Using the tasks, roles, and tools you've defined, map out your official workflow. Create a clear, easy-to-understand document or diagram that outlines each stage and step. Be sure to include details like expected timelines for each stage and who to contact with questions. This document will become the go-to resource for your team. Once it's finalized, hold a training session to walk everyone through the new process, explain the reasoning behind it, and answer any questions. A successful rollout depends on clear communication and team-wide buy-in.
6. Review and Improve Over Time
A content workflow is not a "set it and forget it" document. It's a living process that should evolve with your team, tools, and business needs. Schedule regular check-ins—perhaps quarterly or semi-annually—to review the workflow with your team. What's working well? Are there any new bottlenecks? Are there opportunities to automate more tasks or streamline a particular stage? Be open to feedback and willing to make adjustments. Continuously refining your process ensures that it remains effective and efficient, helping your team adapt to new challenges and consistently improve its output.
Best Practices for an Efficient Workflow
Once you have a workflow in place, the focus shifts to optimization. How can you make your process not just functional, but highly efficient? An efficient workflow minimizes wasted effort, reduces friction, and allows your team to spend more time on high-impact activities. It’s about working smarter, not just harder. By incorporating a few best practices into your daily operations, you can refine your process, improve team productivity, and maintain a high standard of quality even when deadlines are tight. These practices help transform a good workflow into a great one.
Batch Similar Tasks for Better Focus
Constantly switching between different types of work—like writing, editing, and creating graphics—can kill productivity. This is known as context switching, and it drains mental energy. A more efficient approach is to batch similar tasks together. For example, dedicate a specific block of time to writing all your first drafts for the week. Use another block for editing and reviewing content from your peers. By focusing on one type of activity at a time, you can get into a state of flow, work more quickly, and produce higher-quality results with fewer errors.
Repurpose Content Intelligently
One of the biggest advantages of structured authoring is the ability to reuse content. An efficient workflow should have this principle built into its core. Before creating any new content, train your team to first search your repository for existing topics that can be reused or repurposed. This "create once, publish everywhere" approach saves an enormous amount of time and effort. It also ensures consistency across all your documentation, as updates only need to be made in one place. Your workflow should include a clear process for identifying, tagging, and managing reusable components to maximize their value.
Automate Repetitive Work
Many steps in a content workflow are repetitive and administrative, such as sending email notifications for review assignments or manually publishing files to different outputs. These tasks are perfect candidates for automation. Use the features in your content management system to automate as much of this work as possible. Set up automated triggers that notify the next person in the chain as soon as a task is complete. Use automated publishing pipelines to deliver content to all your channels with a single click. Every manual task you automate frees up your team to focus on creating great content.
Define Your Priorities to Avoid Burnout
Not all content is created equal. Some projects are more urgent or have a greater business impact than others. A good workflow should include a system for prioritizing tasks to ensure the team is always working on the most important things first. This helps manage workloads, prevent burnout, and align the content team's efforts with broader company goals. Clear priorities also make it easier to say "no" or "not right now" to lower-priority requests, protecting your team's time and focus. This strategic approach ensures your resources are always directed where they will make the most difference.
Plan for Breaks and Busy Periods
An efficient workflow is also a sustainable one. It's important to build in time for breaks and to plan for the natural ebbs and flows of your business cycle. Encourage your team to step away from their desks to recharge. When you know a major product release or a busy season is coming, adjust your workflow and deadlines accordingly. Proactively planning for these periods can prevent last-minute rushes and reduce stress. A workflow that acknowledges the human element of content creation is more likely to be successful in the long run.
Personal Habits for Better Content Creation
While a strong team workflow is essential, the personal habits of each content creator also play a huge role in productivity and quality. A great process can't compensate for burnout, disorganization, or a lack of creative energy. As writers and content professionals, developing effective personal habits allows us to bring our best selves to our work each day. These practices help us manage our energy, capture inspiration, and maintain the focus needed to tackle complex technical topics. Cultivating these habits can make a significant difference in both the quality of your work and your overall job satisfaction.
Work With Your Creative Rhythms
Everyone has periods of the day when they feel more focused and creative. Some people do their best writing first thing in the morning, while others hit their stride in the afternoon. Pay attention to your own energy levels and try to schedule your most demanding tasks—like drafting new content—during your peak creative times. Use your lower-energy periods for more administrative tasks, like checking email, attending meetings, or organizing files. Working in sync with your natural rhythms, rather than fighting against them, can make you far more productive and the creative process feel less like a struggle.
Keep a System for Capturing Ideas
Inspiration doesn't always strike when you're sitting at your desk. An idea for a better way to explain a concept or a new topic for the help center can pop into your head at any time. It's crucial to have a simple, reliable system for capturing these ideas before they disappear. This could be a dedicated notebook, a notes app on your phone, or a voice memo. The tool doesn't matter as much as the habit of using it consistently. Having a central place for your ideas ensures that you can capture those fleeting moments of insight and revisit them when you're ready to develop them further.
Reduce Unnecessary Screen Time
As content creators, we spend most of our day staring at a screen. This can lead to mental fatigue and eye strain, which can stifle creativity and reduce the quality of our work. Make a conscious effort to build screen-free time into your day. Step away from your computer for short breaks, take a walk during lunch, or read a physical book instead of scrolling through your phone. Disconnecting, even for a few minutes, can help you recharge your mental batteries, gain a fresh perspective on a problem, and come back to your work with renewed focus and energy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a formal workflow really necessary for a small team? It might seem like overkill when you can just talk to your one or two teammates directly, but establishing a process early is about building good habits. It creates a foundation that allows you to scale smoothly as your team and content demands grow. A simple, documented workflow ensures consistency from day one and makes onboarding your next hire a much more straightforward process.
How is a content workflow different from a style guide? Think of it this way: your style guide defines the "what" of your content—what tone to use, which grammar rules to follow, and how to format things. Your content workflow defines the "how" of the process. It's the operational map that shows how a piece of content moves from an idea to a published reality, outlining who is responsible for each step along the way. Both are essential for creating consistent, high-quality documentation.
How can I get buy-in from busy team members, like subject matter experts? This is a classic challenge. The key is to show them how the workflow makes their lives easier, not harder. Frame it as a way to protect their time by providing clear, concise review requests and eliminating last-minute fire drills. When they see that the process is predictable, respects their schedule, and results in better content, they're much more likely to participate without friction.
Can I implement a workflow without a dedicated CCMS? You can certainly start with more basic tools, but you'll likely feel the limitations as you scale. The real power of a workflow comes alive in a system designed for it, like a Component Content Management System. A CCMS automates the handoffs, tracks everything in one place, and removes the manual busywork of chasing people and files. It turns your documented process into a living, efficient operation.
Our new workflow seems to be slowing us down. What should we do? That's a clear sign that your workflow needs a tune-up, not that you should abandon the idea. A good process should remove friction, not create it. Talk to your team to pinpoint the exact bottleneck. Is a review stage taking too long? Are there too many steps for a simple update? A workflow is a living document, so don't be afraid to simplify it and make adjustments until it feels supportive and efficient for your team's reality.
Key Takeaways
- Document your process to scale effectively: A written-down workflow is your team's single source of truth. It ensures everyone follows the same steps for creation and review, which is the key to producing consistent, high-quality content as your team grows.
- Solve persistent problems with a clear structure: A defined workflow eliminates common frustrations like approval bottlenecks and communication silos. It creates a transparent process where everyone understands their role, making it easy to spot and resolve issues before they impact deadlines.
- Build your workflow with the right tools: Design a process that fits your team by auditing your current methods, defining each task and role, and documenting the system. A CCMS is crucial for automating manual steps and managing the entire content lifecycle in one place.
