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Vesa Purho
Development Manager, Nokia
During this year and last, I wrote many articles about
understanding and using various tools created for marketing
and business development also in documentation. Now because
the economy still isn't picking up, business understanding
becomes more and more valuable for us to survive during
reorganisation, to continue to provide value to the
customer, and to keep our sanity.
Understanding the basics about business development and
competition strategies can help us to decide where to focus
our scarce resources. In my experience, the majority of
documentation personnel, at least here in Finland, have a
language background and are not educated in business or
engineering. Such people have a tendency to look at the
documentation from the "goodness" point-of-view and not
necessarily to think about how well the documentation
fulfills the business goals of a company.
Sometimes, we just need to let go and deliver something that
we would not normally do. For example, if the survival of a
product depends on the price, we need to take price into
account when thinking about what kind of documentation we
deliver with the product. Top management will set budget
limits, but I hope that understanding why and what the goals
of the company are regarding the product will diminish our
stress factor and that we will stop fighting the windmills.
Naturally, there are bad and good ways to save money.
Reducing the scope of documentation is one of the good ways.
You need to know what are the most important documents that
the users need and then create only those documents. This
requires another kind of business understanding,
understanding the business of your customers. Or, you could
eliminate some of the functionality of the documentation,
like an index. A bad way to save money is to tell the
writers to do whatever they like within the budget. Then,
you will have one writer who decides not to proofread,
another who reduces the graphics, and a third who omits
testing the documentation against the product. These
decisions may have saved money, but the documentation
probably isn't fulfilling the customer's needs or your
business needs.
On the other hand, sometimes we have to argue against the
budget cuts. Understanding the business models helps you to
back up your arguments. If the target is to reduce the
customer's operating costs or if the competitive strategy is
to focus on markets that are ready to pay premium price for
a quality product, a good user interface and documentation
are essential. Again, understanding the customers' business
helps you in determining how important the documentation
actually is and what documentation they actually need.
So, my call for action is to study the basics of business
development. You don't need an MBA to understand the basics
and how they can be applied in documentation. Another action
you need to take is to talk to your marketing and product
management people and find out the strategies they are
developing. Tell them that you can do your part in realising
the strategies if they are willing to share them with you.
This article is the personal opinion of the author and does
not necessarily reflect the opinion or practice of Nokia.
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