At one time or another, every manager I know has been tasked with producing miracle content. Sometimes, other priorities must take a back seat or even get canceled. Often, we just need to find a way to get the job done.
Perhaps you are releasing a new content deliverable to your customer base in a very short time. Maybe you are tasked with creating specialized content that exceeds your team’s knowledge. Either way, you need to develop and deliver content fast and you may not have the skills, knowledge or headcount to do it.
This may be when you start to consider outsourcing the content development. In order to successfully outsource your content development work, you need to know if and when you should work with a contractor.
Here are three signs that indicate that you need a content development contractor on your next project.
- You have too much work, not enough staff
The reason most customers engage a contractor is that they have too much work and not enough staff to do it. Here are just a few examples of common circumstances for engaging a contractor:
- An employee unexpectedly leaves the company in the middle of a project
- Management requests a new deliverable that was not scoped in your plan
- The actual workload exceeds your plan
- Unexpected change requests have slowed your throughput
When you are in a position in which you simply don’t have enough people to do the work, you need to find a qualified contractor quickly.
- You need specialized skills or knowledge
Sometimes, you may need more than just another proverbial “pair of hands.” Perhaps your company is releasing a new product or service, and no one on your team has the background needed
to do the job. Even if you have enough staff, there often isn’t enough time to educate and train an employee while simultaneously creating quality content.
When this happens, your best option is to hire a contractor who has deep knowledge of the topic. In an ideal world, you hire someone who has written specifically about the topic in the past. At minimum, you hire someone who has the right background and experience to get the job done correctly and quickly.
Maybe you don’t need someone with deep knowledge of a particular subject matter. Maybe you need someone with expertise in a particular toolset, technology, or process. I’ve had customers hire our experts to work in legacy tools until the customer has time to migrate the content into the new toolset. It does not make sense for the customer to train staff to use the legacy tool only to have the tool go away.
I’ve also had customers hire our experts to work in new toolsets while the staff completed a training program and phased adoption of the new system. In those cases, our experts often help train the staff on how to use the system and, more importantly, on the “tips ‘n’ tricks” of using it most effectively.
Examples of the specialized skills we’ve provided to our customers in recent years:
- Structured authoring
- Taxonomy and metadata
- Specific content management or authoring tools
- Content optimization
- Style guide creation or harmonization
- Template creation
- Content transformation
- eLearning course development
- API documentation
- You only need short term help
One of the main benefits of hiring a contractor to develop content is that you only pay them when you need them. This makes working with contractors more cost-effective, when compared to hiring full-time, fully burdened employees. You only pay for the time contractors work. Once the work is over, you’re done paying
- (Bonus) You need to scale
This last key indicator is a freebie for sticking around until the end.
Imagine an accordion that is so flexible that it just keeps expanding. In a lot of ways, a team of contractors is the same. Our customers have found that it is much easier to scale-up using contractors to develop content, particularly when those contractors bring background knowledge and experience to the project.
If you need a project done more quickly, hire more contractors. You can even split the workload among them and get things done two or three times faster. Of course, not every project lends itself to a team, but you might be surprised how often a team approach makes your content development more efficient.
If you want to learn more about how to leverage a contractor to create quality content for your next project, download A Guide to Successful Content Outsourcing eBook.
Val is on the Advisory Board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus.
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