Big plans take time

I’m procrastinating.

I’ve reached a certain point in the work I’m doing that requires the completion of a very large planning spreadsheet. I’m currently looking at all of our content with a view to restructuring it to fit better with the way our customers work hopefully making it easier for people to browse the content.

I’m taking an organic approach for this first pass. Taking the chapters in each current guide and rather than forcing them into a pre-existing structure, I’m making an educated guess as to where they might live in the future. Once that is complete I’ll take the list of suggested locations, give them a quick sanity check and mockup some examples and take them to some of our customers.

This is all part of a move away from monolithic PDFs, towards a more focussed set of content that is available online. However, whilst we are concentrating the bulk of our thoughts and efforts on our HTML based “Knowledge Centre”, the need for PDFs remains and hopefully the new structure will help keep the set of published PDFs much leaner by splitting out only the information that people need to be published in that format.

At present it’s definitely one of those jobs that ‘just needs done’. It’s not hugely challenging, nor particularly enjoyable but such is life. The end goal will, hopefully, just the means and all that.

It’s still got a way to go before it best my ‘most boring job’ though. That one involved reformatting hundreds of single pages of content, all held in separate Word documents as part of a migration process from one tool to another. It only took a month or so…