What Fast Food Managers Have and Tech Pub Managers Need

Diane Wieland and Scott Abel of TheContentWrangler.com tell it like it is in this editorial in the July 2007 issue of DCLNews.

To quote: “Technical documentation departments can learn a lot from industries that have spent decades collecting and analyzing process information, industries like the fast food industry. McDonald’s has earned four billion dollars in cash from operations the past three years. The success of McDonald’s was built on collecting information on its processes and finding ways to slash six seconds from the drive-thru line. A McDonald’s manager is far more likely to know the details about his or her store than a tech doc, training, or support center manager knows about his or her department. This is, of course, unacceptable. In what other profession would such an absence of metrics and control be allowed? When you think about technical documentation and training management in this way, it’s easy to see that we have a long way to go.”

The message: Managing without metrics is dumb and unprofessional. If you’re not collecting metrics—or better yet, using tools to automatically capture them for you—you should be.

Read What Fast Food Managers Have and Tech Pub Managers Need

Filed under: Content Quality Management : Technical Writing