Literature planning and workflow

Why should the creation of technical information be managed?

Technical documentation departments of mid-size companies are typically rather small with 3‒5 technical writers. Therefore, one might ask:

Why do we need task and workflow management to organize all of this?

Broken down to the basics, a workflow management system maintains the open tasks a specific user has and creates the follow-up tasks for other users once a task is done.

Seen as such, a workflow system makes sense even for one single user, because it keeps track of the current tasks, any accompanying information and the deadline ‒ nothing can get lost simply because the PostIt has fallen off the screen.

But even in small teams, there is often one person having more of an overview of the big picture while other writers are technically skilled in detail and write the documentation, create the illustrations, provide technical data and the like. In such constellations, it is a quite natural approach that the "big picture" person does the planning and distributes the work items, and the other authors fulfill them. While a "classical" way to manage such work relies on tools like Microsoft Excel, this is not optimal:

• If the plan changes, the planning person must actively notify the other contributors that they should check the updated Excel sheet.
• Completion of work items must actively be documented by users in the Excel sheet.