Top 10 Obstacles To On Time Delivery of Technical Documentation
Top 10 Obstacles To On Time Delivery of Technical Documentation
Discover the challenges that introduce delays and prevent tech pubs shops from building more-effective content production capabilities
The 2023 Technical Documentation Staffing Survey, which garnered responses from over 500 tech comm pros, highlights the ten main challenges impeding timely delivery of documentation. Tech pub leaders and documentation managers made up 51% of the respondents, while 48% were technical writers or product information developers. The rest consisted of information architects, content designers, and UX writers.
The survey, conducted by The Content Wrangler (with help from the Center for Information Development Management and Content Science), illuminates the need to properly support tech doc programs. Neglecting to address the issues identified in the survey not only introduces challenges making deadlines, but it also stifles the team's potential to expand its capabilities through the adoption of more efficient and effective methods for content creation, management, and delivery.
1. Financial Resource Constraints
The top obstacle facing technical documentation teams today is constraints on financial resources — limitations that they say hinder the documentation process.
76% of respondents say insufficient resources prevent them from getting work done on time, with 58% reporting that their top need is a more substantial financial investment, especially if the organizations they serve want tech pub teams to deliver on time and develop the capabilities to deliver what their customers need and expect.
2. Time Constraints
The second obstacle facing technical documentation shops is a shortage of time. 57% of respondents say that not having enough time to complete their work is a top reason why meeting their deadlines is challenging. Not having sufficient time to get the job done right impacts quality and limits their ability to produce the content experiences that delight customers.
3. Staffing Issues
The third most common impediment facing technical documentation shops is a shortage of staff. 47% of respondents say that insufficient staffing levels and an inability to find or attract candidates with the right skillsets is negatively affecting their team’s potential, sometimes introducing challenges that create difficulty meeting deadlines.
Anecdotally, some U.S. tech docs managers we interviewed say they believe the exceptionally low U.S. unemployment rate (3.6% as of June 2023) is making it particularly difficult to attract talent.
Finding candidates with in-demand skillsets like experience creating structured content (most often, DITA XML), working with software code, crafting API Docs, building taxonomies and terminologies, and producing UX and conversational content is particularly difficult.
4. Difficulty Getting Information From Subject Matter Experts
The fourth most common obstacle facing technical documentation pros is the inability to obtain necessary information from busy subject matter experts (SMEs). 77% of respondents say difficulties gaining access to SMEs and problems extracting relevant information from them negatively impacts productivity and leads to incomplete and potentially inaccurate documentation.
SMEs are an invaluable resources for technical writers, helping them to create precise, comprehensive, and user-friendly docs. Without access to these experts, the quality, utility, and effectiveness of the product information suffers.
5. Conflicting Priorities
The fifth most common challenge technical publications teams face are conflicting priorities. Clashing and shifting priorities causes uncertainty, fear, and anxiety, leading to negative impacts on the team’s capacity to complete their work on time and guarantee its high quality and completeness.
A shift in priority, while sometimes necessary, requires a deliberate and thoughtfully-prepared strategy. Managers of tech docs departments that are affected by conflicting priorities say competing priorities are responsible for disruptions in workflow, decreased productivity, quality compromises, increased workplace stress, and add to resource allocation challenges.
Prioritization conflicts sometimes cause can lead to resources being moved from one project to another, resulting in the team having less time or fewer staff members to work on existing documentation deliverables. When the conflicts become too much for some staff to endure, employees may quit their jobs in search of more suitable working conditions.
6. Changing Requirements
The sixth most common challenge facing technical publications teams are changing requirements. Shifting demands on tech docs teams can negatively impact productivity and damage focus of technical documentation teams in a variety of ways.
One in four technical documentation teams say changing requirements create the need to revise and rework to align with changing demands, resulting in increasing workload and decreasing productivity. Repeated changes disrupt team focus, leading to confusion and misunderstanding about requirements, opening the door for mistakes or inconsistencies to creep into documentation.
When requirements change midway through a project, those changes can introduce significant delays as team adjust their plans to update the docs. Missed deadlines, extended project timelines, decreased morale, and resource allocation difficulties are also common result of shifting requirements, survey participants say.
7. Difficulty Collaborating With Cross-Functional Teams
The seventh most common challenge facing technical docs squads is coordinating with other groups across the enterprise. Nearly one-in-four teams say this is an obstacle that prevents them from doing their best work.
Difficulty collaborating with cross-functional teams can significantly hamper the efficiency and effectiveness of technical documentation staff. Producing quality documentation on time and on budget requires input and support from various departments (e.g., engineering, design, support, and product management). Difficulties collaborating with other teams can lead to misunderstandings, gaps in information, and delays, respondents report.
8. Lack of Leadership Support
The eighth most common challenge facing documentation teams is lack of leadership support with 23% reporting that without appropriate leadership backing, their teams struggle to complete their work on time. Teams that aren’t fully-supported by leadership often lack sufficient budget, tools, and personnel to effectively execute their tasks.
Teams without appropriate support from leadership also report difficulties gaining cooperation from other departments. Sometimes, they may be excluded from high-level strategic discussions, resulting in a misalignment between business objectives and documentation efforts.
In these organizations, documentation is not be well understood or appreciated. As a result, technical documentation teams aren’t a priority in company-wide initiatives, their success isn’t celebrated, and their efforts go unrecognized.
9. Inadequate Software Tools
The ninth most common challenge facing teams that produce technical documentation is being saddled with the wrong tools for the job. 20% of teams surveyed say they cannot streamline the way they create, manage, and deliver content across various platforms because they are using outmoded, unsuitable, or inadequate software.
Not having the best tech stack can drastically reduce team productivity, lead to content inconsistencies, and may result in additional, unnecessary manual work. Inefficiencies translate into delays in delivery and negatively impact the quality of the final product.
In post-survey, followup interviews with team leaders, it’s clear that appropriate, user-friendly, and feature-rich technical documentation software tools are essential for teams to improve efficiency, maintain quality control, ensure timely delivery of content, and promote innovative solutions to challenges in the fast-paced and ever-changing content landscape.
10. Lack of Clear Goals and Expectations
The tenth most common obstacle facing documentation teams is a lack of clear (and measurable) goals and expectations. The absence of clarity can significantly impact the performance and productivity of technical documentation shops. Without well-defined objectives, tracking progress and determining whether the team is on the right track is difficult, if not impossible.
Staffers waste time and resources and spend significant effort on non-critical tasks or unnecessary details. The absence of clear direction leads to confusion about — and inconsistencies in — work, as different understandings of the project requirements introduce uncertainty.
Managers we interviewed say a lack of measurable goals makes it difficult to evaluate team and individual performance, leading to low morale and decreased motivation, as team members might not feel recognized for their efforts.
They also blame this situation for "scope creep", as projects expand beyond what was initially intended, making projects more complex and time-consuming than planned, further hampering the on-time delivery of technical documentation and making it impossible to focus on building capability for the future.