Herding Cats: The Benefit of Unifying Content for Customers

Getting people to work together is like herding cats. There are different departments (with different personalities, budgets, and priorities). Can be disagreements across departments, and changes can also cause issues.

Sometimes different departments are working on the exact same thing and not know it. Departments working toward the same goals in different ways and not communicating. Important to bridge those silos. If not, perceived just as someone who works on your own team on your own agenda. Worse, a reputation of impeding other organizations.

And then there are customers wondering just how many companies they are working with. From an outside perspective, you can see that the teams at Apple are all working with each other. 

Cat Herding 101

"It's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit." Harry Truman

Create a unified goal. Listen to other departments. Establish common goals across departments. The goals should include aligning message and content.

Build a content partnership to align information across departments.

We have the mindset that we are the first users. We go through our product certification and understand the user journey.

Videos created within your company can help you develop your own content. Videos are often made by SMEs. You can use your tools to improve the videos. Marketing departments love video. If you synchronize with marketing, you can get videos that illustrate concepts in your documentation.

Listen very carefully to what support has to say and use that to polish and fine-tune your content. KB-to-doc initiative, analyze KB (knowledge base) information and see what should be in the docs. (This is exactly what I'm doing at my company.)

Go where your cats are. Go to anything that sales or your customers put together. It's another source of information.