DCL DITA Article Series Spotlight (Oh, and Some Time Travel)

By Leigh Anne Mazure, Marketing Manager, Lead Generation, Data Conversion Laboratory

Dave Lister had a golden opportunity, and he blew it.

How often have you wished you could go back in time to the beginning of a project and do it all differently, knowing what you know now? A five-part series of articles on DITA implementation, by Naveh Greenberg, DCL’s US Defense Development Director, highlights a survey of companies that likely would largely agree that some time-hopping would come in very handy.

• Take a Dose of Realism in Planning the People Aspects of DITA Implementation

• Phased DITA Implementation Increases Manageability… and Your Odds of Success

• Know Your Success Criteria for Your DITA Implementation Before You Start

• Relying on Experience: SMEs, Consultants and Vendors Can Take a Role Implementing DITA

• The Five P's of DITA Implementations: Lessons from Successful Initiatives

These articles share tales of those who recognized project requirements after the fact so you don’t have to.

So who’s this Dave guy? You see, he’s a crew member aboard the outer-space mineral-mining ship Red Dwarf, in the sci-fi sitcom of the same name (the Dwarf name, not the “Dave” one). In fact, he’s the only crew member. It’s a long story, but one day he discovers he can travel back in time to before the fateful day all the crew but him were vaporized because some easily-avoided shoddy soldering let in a radiation leak. If you’ve never seen the show, take a guess at what he decides to do about that situation once he arrives in the past. It’s obvious, right?

Meanwhile, back on Earth, DCL’s study of twelve companies who adopted DITA for their content management reveals, as seen in part one, that “only two were leveraging content reuse in any significant way by the end of their implementation phase... In hindsight, most found that they should have planned for simpler pilots, and built in time to experiment with various pieces of the workflow.” Part two tells us “they unanimously agreed [a move to DITA] always takes far longer than anticipated.”

While we don’t have to worry about such stumbling blocks getting us vaporized, it’s still clear that a thorough plan is a must before taking on a DITA conversion. “One of the most common reasons for the failure of major implementation projects,” part three says, “is a lack of clear success criteria by which the effort will be measured.” Part four discusses how the surveyed companies discovered the advantages of not relying on internal experience only. What are the top “do”s to learn from the “don’t”s? There’s a useful checklist in part five.

As for our friend Dave, armed with the knowledge of what’s going to happen to the ship and the crew whom he now misses, and given the amazing chance to fix things retroactively – of course he makes sure the soldering job is done properly so nobody goes vvvvrrFWOOP, right?

Wrong. His actual plan is to convince his favorite fellow (female) crew member to return and stay with him among the wreckage in the present. Er, future. Er... anyway, a total miss of the big picture. (To be fair, though, his doing the more sensible thing would have erased this otherwise cool show’s premise and ended the series then and there.)

But you don’t have to be a Space Dave. There’s no need to worry about wishing for another chance in the first place if you look at the big picture and plan your migration to DITA carefully before you start. DCL can help.

You’ll need to turn elsewhere for your expert spaceship welding, though.