I. Intro
The field of content strategy as an umbrella discipline covers all aspects of content. Besides the development, conceptualization, creation, design and maintenance (often referred to as the “front end” of content strategy), there is also “the back end” side of content strategy, that deals with the processes and the technical set-up.
In every content project one often not only deals with what kind of content is published, but also looks at the process itself: how content is created by whom, with which tools; how it is stored, altered, processed and delivered and how the statuses of processing are documented and communicated along the way.
Even if the project’s scope is not large and the team is not that big: when trying to get an overview of all the processes at play and all the people involved, it can get pretty complex pretty quickly.
The process of a content strategy project usually consists of four phases:
In the discovery phase, the organization and it’s departments, the tasks, processes and channels of communications are documented. All the findings from these insight are valuated in the next step, the current-state-analysis, that is followed by the definition of the expected future state. From a gap analysis between those two, the necessary steps to be taken are derived, and rolled out in the final phase of implementation. More in-depth information can be found in this article by one of my esteemed colleagues.
II. The case
The example I am going to be referring to in this article has been conducted in an EduTech company, that is producing digital educational material. The project’s goal was to build a business requirement matrix to deduct the company’s business goals into business requirements, given the status quo of content, it’s production and the available resources, and derive the necessary steps to be taken and prioritize them. So it is situated in the first two phases: the discovery and the assessment of the current state of things.
In the first phase of exploration experts from the different departments were interviewed. They were asked to describe the workflows they are involved in within their department, the tools they used were assessed and their touchpoints with the technical infrastructure documented.
Senior team members from the following departments were interviewed:
- frontend development
- IT-infrastructure
- the editorial department
- the art department
Reviewing the notes taken and getting an overall feeling for the structure of the organization and its complexity, it soon became clear that there is an end to the possibilities of describing organizational structures and the workflows within them using words.
III. Enter: the flowchart
This is where the power of visualization becomes visible. A much-quoted study from MIT reveals the incredible speed in which we process visual information, which is estimated about 60000 times faster than we process text.
There are different models of visualizing workflows, specifically tailored to various fields of application. There is a great, detailed overview on different types of flowcharts and also the history of their origins.
In the discusses case, I used a system flowchart to visualize the processes, combined with a swimlane flowchart to depict the departments involved and the location of the data at the different stages of the overall process, from the beginning (the conceptualization), to the end (the output of the final product).
Employing and overlaying these different types, I was able to visualize various parameters of the workflow at the same time:
- the type of process: communication / editing / storage / output
- the tools used
- the departments involved
The analysis of the flowchart revealed a number of issues in the workflow, that had also been brought up in the interviews already and were confirmed when having the flowchart checked by each department for accuracy and integrity.
Presenting the resulting flowchart together with the documented pain points and the time estimations that had been assigned by each departments’ spokesperson to each task, the stakeholders were alarmed and convinced that measure had to be taken to improve the processes and the communication accompanying them.
By creating a visual representation, it was possible to illustrate the many layers of creation, modification, storage and communication that happen in the content production process and to reveal problems and bottlenecks, uncovering the potential to save time and resources by solving them.
IV. Tools
There are a number of tools available that are specifically built to create flowcharts. Some of them are free to use, others are freemium offers. Most of them come with templates for different types of charts.
The above workflow chart was created using the plug-in vscode-drawio in VisualStudioCode. The plug-in is basically a rebuild of the free (online) tool draw.io. I started building from scratch.
Obviously it is also possible to create flowcharts in every design tool (like Canva, Miro, the Adobe CC palette), the advantages of more specialized tools like Draw.io, Lucidchart or Cacoo, lie in the provisions of templates, specific workflow-related graphical objects (shapes) and ease of use, like magnetic connection and fast labelling.
Happy flowcharting!
