Outsourcing Technical Writing

Barry Saiff

• Publisher: XML Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781937434649
• eBook ISBN: 9781492070832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Outsourcing stirs strong emotions. Employees associate it with layoffs, reduced quality, and plummeting morale. Managers often don't understand the potential, thinking either that it will reduce their costs by large amounts or that it will make them obsolete, too. The truth is that, when done correctly, outsourcing often does not lead to layoffs, can lead to increased quality, and can even boost morale. Although the inflated savings that some managers have been led to believe are untrue (outsourcing can rarely, if ever, reduce content development costs by more than 60 percent), outsourcing can still be a win for both a company and its employees.Outsourcing Technical Writing: A Primer provides a comprehensive introduction to outsourcing technical writing. Barry Saiff, who has had extensive experience with outsourced content development, provides a roadmap for outsourcing success along with cases studies, a sample outsourcing agreement, and a sample plan. He also connects the success of outsourcing with management excellence and process maturity.

Outsourcing

Technical Writing

A Primer

Barry Saiff

Preface

Are you afraid of outsourcing your technical writing? If so, perhaps it’s because you believe one or more of the following things about outsourcing technical writing:

• Outsourcing always leads to reduced content quality.
• Outsourcing always results in layoffs.
• Outsourcing always reduces morale on existing teams.
• Outsourcing can usually cut costs by more than 60%.

All of these statements are false. Are you surprised?

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to technical writing outsourcing. In the following pages, you will learn that:

• Outsourcing can lead to increased content quality.
• Outsourcing often does not result in any layoffs.
• Outsourcing can actually boost morale on existing writing teams.
• Outsourcing can rarely, if ever, reduce content development costs by more than 60%.

In addition to outsourcing technical writing and other types of content development, this book also discusses management and the keys to organizational effectiveness.

Why discuss management in a book about technical writing outsourcing? Effective management is a prerequisite for effective outsourcing. If your management practices are not adequate for your current situation, outsourcing is likely to exacerbate your challenges.

If you want to understand how to create positive results from outsourcing, you need to first understand how to create positive results in business more broadly.

1. Who should read this book?

If you are a technical communications professional – whether an individual contributor or a manager – you will likely not have sole authority over decisions to outsource, and you may not even get advance notice before outsourcing occurs. The key question for you is not whether to outsource, but how to most effectively outsource.

Your interest in this book shows that you are already ahead of the game. By learning about outsourcing, you can move from fear to mastery. You can prepare yourself to influence outsourcing decisions before they happen and help ensure that the results are positive.

1.1. Lead writers, managers, and related decision makers

If you’re in one of these categories and you’re not involved in outsourcing yet, you will be soon. Read this book to prepare yourself. Each of the chapters contains information that you will find useful at some point in your outsourcing journey.

1.2. Outsourcing professionals

If you work in procurement, purchasing, vendor management, or outsourcing management, you may not be familiar with technical communicators. Read this book to learn about the specific challenges involved in outsourcing content development.

For decision makers and outsourcing professionals, this book answers the following questions:

• Is outsourcing right for your organization?
• What key factors must you consider at each stage of the outsourcing process?
• What does it take to succeed in outsourcing technical writing?
• What are the keys to organizational effectiveness, and how can management contribute to the success of an outsourcing effort?

1.3. Technical writers

If you are a technical writer, your job security depends on a variety of factors – some within and some outside your control. Fear and resistance to outsourcing will not help you advance. On the contrary, they can lead you to miss opportunities. By embracing the reality of outsourcing, you can prepare yourself to take advantage of the changes coming your way. Check out Section 14.1, “Adjusting to outsourcing as a team member” in Chapter 14, Sell Your Plan: Selling Down for guidance on adopting a healthy mindset and explore some of the other chapters to understand the pressures and trade-offs facing your management team as they make decisions about outsourcing.

For technical writers, this book answers the following questions:

• If you are not making all the decisions, how can you best deal with the changes that outsourcing brings?
• How can you continue to contribute to, and be valued by, your organization?

2. A personal note

Before getting involved in technical writing outsourcing, I had a long career in technical documentation. I started as a technical writer in 1984. Over the next 26 years, I led documentation teams at six companies, sometimes creating teams from scratch. For the first 25 of those years, I worked exclusively with technical writers based in the United States. Other departments – particularly software engineering and quality assurance – sometimes had offshore members, but never the technical writing team. In my final year working in the US, that changed. I was working for a large software company, and our division had begun reducing staff in the US and expanding into India and China. That year, we added two writers in India.

At first, I was skeptical of the Indian writers. Their written English had grammar issues, and they made other mistakes. However, I soon discovered that they were amazing learners. If I explained what was wrong with their text, they would fix it, and they would not make the same mistakes again.

By this point, I had worked as a contract technical writer for much of my career. Typically, I worked full-time, on-site at a client company, but I was actually employed by a contracting firm. The contractor paid me an hourly wage with no benefits. Usually the hourly wage was higher than I could get as a salaried employee and sometimes the contractor facilitated my purchase of benefits.

One of the aspects of this situation that I liked was the freedom my employers had to get rid of me quickly. (Yes, you read that correctly.) If my work was not satisfactory, they could fire me. That didn’t happen. Instead, I continued to get new contracts, at higher rates, often staying at a client company longer than most of the employees I worked with. I always knew that I was doing good work – because if I wasn’t, the job would end.

The client paid the contractor an hourly rate for my work. This rate was significantly higher than the rate I actually received – anywhere from 33% to 100% higher. For years I thought, if only I could get into that business, I could make a great deal of money. However, I really didn’t know how to get started, and it seemed that I would need a great deal of capital.

In 2004, I was working in-house for a startup when we were bought by a large, established software company. As Director of Documentation and someone who had started early at the firm, I had quite a few shares of stock. I realized that I did not have enough money to start a company in the US, but perhaps I had enough to start one in the Philippines.

Why the Philippines? Two primary reasons: first, English is one of the two official languages of the country. And second, given the country’s long history with the United States, the culture is very Western-friendly.

So, in my last few years living and working in San Francisco, I began researching how it might work to build a technical writing outsourcing company in the Philippines. I talked with other documentation leaders and managers who worked on teams that were split between India and the US. I asked about their challenges.

The two primary issues with the writers in India were quality and turnover. Regarding quality, I asked about editing. Despite the fact that English was not the writers’ native language, editing was often dropped from the budget. Turnover was also an issue due to the hot job market in Indian technology centers. However, I suspected that another cause of the high turnover rates might be management.

When I started my company, about a year after moving to the Philippines, I sought to address these issues. I did not start in one of the three major cities – Manila, Davao, or Cebu. Given the number of educated, skilled people throughout the Philippines, I had many good choices about where to begin. We launched our business in the mountain resort town of Tagaytay City, in the province of Cavite, adjacent to the National Capital Region. Seven years later, with a full-time staff of 75, we are still in Tagaytay City. People are grateful to find good jobs near where they live.

I also designed the company to address the quality issue. From the start, we were not just a company of Filipino technical writers. The company was owned and run by an experienced US technical communications leader (yours truly). I was also our first editor. We now have teams of quality control specialists, editors, and others who review content to ensure quality. We also employ a variety of remote consultants, in Europe, North America, and Asia. We’ve hired a team of multimedia artists and expanded our business into animation, video, and motion infographics, and we’re starting to train our writing team in multimedia arts as well.

I’ve worked hard to build a good corporate culture, based on a set of values and basic commitments that include excellence, honesty, and integrity. We do not engage in deception. We treat people fairly. In seven years, we’ve had only five resignations.

Along the way, I’ve learned a great deal about how to make technical writing outsourcing work. Despite all the obstacles and challenges, our teams have made some of the largest companies in the world very happy. And crucially, none of our customers have been interested in saving money alone (though they certainly have saved a great deal). Year in and year out, we have been lucky to work with companies that care deeply about content quality.

Moreover, despite the frequency of layoffs involving outsourcing, layoffs have never occurred at our client companies as a result of our work.

And yet, what I’ve learned from working directly in technical writing outsourcing is not widely understood in the US technical communication community. Many technical writers are deeply threatened by the idea of outsourcing. They often have difficulty letting go of their assumptions that outsourcing always leads to reductions in quality – or worse, layoffs – even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

One thing that has contributed to my success is being attracted to reality. This hunger to find out the facts is fundamental to technical communicators. Up to this point, there has been no book that helps readers navigate the true challenges and opportunities of technical writing outsourcing. I’m proud to say that now there is.

3. How to use this book

This book is divided into four parts plus an appendix:

• Part I (Chapters 1 and 2) describes the rise of outsourcing, the forces behind it, and why outsourcing may be right for your company.
• Part II (Chapters 3 and 4) focuses on management and organizational effectiveness.
• Part III (Chapters 5 through 17) offers a roadmap for creating, selling, and implementing an outsourcing plan.
• Part IV (Chapters 18 and 19) contains case studies and some conclusions.
• Appendix: Sample Outsourcing Agreement

An Introduction to Outsourcing

Chapter 1. Introduction

Many people see outsourcing as a cause of disruption, dysfunction, organizational failure, and layoffs. While outsourcing can be followed by these things, consider the following:

• Outsourcing alone does not lead to layoffs, dysfunction, or other negative outcomes. Whether you have good or bad results depends primarily on how decisions are made and how outsourcing is planned and implemented
• The same factors that lead to negative outcomes from outsourcing also lead to bad business results more generally, even in the absence of outsourcing.

Outsourcing often gets blamed for things that actually have deeper causes. For example, if your organization has immature processes, outsourcing can exacerbate the resulting challenges. The following red flags are strong indications that your organization is not ready for outsourcing:

• Technical writers struggle to find out about user interface changes
• Product specifications are incomplete, out of date, or don’t exist
• Subject matter experts have no time to answer writers’ questions

Until you address these process deficiencies, outsourcing is unlikely to work and may make matters worse.

Sometimes, companies engage in outsourcing as a way to address internal disruption, dysfunction, or organizational failure. As we will see later, outsourcing under these conditions is likely to fail.

1.1. Understanding outsourcing

Regardless of whether you are responsible for planning or managing outsourcing, you can benefit from understanding how it works. The following terms are important for understanding outsourcing:

• In-house: Work performed by the employees of an enterprise, generally in the enterprise’s offices.
• Outsourced: Work performed by organizations or contractors external to the enterprise.
• Onshore: Work performed in the enterprise’s home country or home region (Europe, North America, etc.).
• Nearshore: Work performed in other countries that are close to the home country in both location and cost of living – usually in either the same time zone or a close time zone.
• Offshore: Work performed in other countries, typically with large time zone differences and much lower labor costs.

Various combinations of these terms are possible (for example: in-house offshore or outsourced nearshore). In this book, I use the term outsourcing to mean outsourced offshore work.

1.2. Growth and drivers of technical writing outsourcing

While technical ...

Table of contents

• Outsourcing Technical Writing