DEPLOYING DITA FACTORY
Implementing a new documentation system has an impact on your organization and your information system architecture. In order to guarantee a successful outcome, 4D CONCEPT relies on a project management method adapted to documentary engineering. We also use this project management approach to make a success of the adoption of DITA in your company.
The 4D CONCEPT project manager handles communication, brings the teams together, uses a network of skills at 4D CONCEPT and at the customer’s, and manages budgets defined at the start.
One firm belief above all
Technical documentation is a channel of communication between brands and their customers.
- Knowing and anticipating the expectations of these customers is essential.
- Customers’ habits are changing: Smartphones, apps, social networks, video games, tourism, mobility (3.8 billion smartphone users worldwide).
- But customers are heavily targeted: in order to attract an audience, messages must be modern, contextualized and personalized.
- Personalization is a must between the customer (a CRM database) and the system (PLM, V.I.N., logistics, feedback from past experience, etc.).
- Documentation is used to find information, so a search engine is unavoidable and must correspond to new habits (indexing, semantics, voice search, pattern recognition, AR, etc.).
For a 360° communication,
you have to think: « DIGITAL FIRST! ».
And for digital information production, you have to rely on one standard: DITA XML.
Expertise
Our technical experience with major manufacturers, combined with our business expertise, allows us to offer you a documentation solution adapted to today’s needs: mobile apps, embedded systems, connected objects, on-demand publishing.
Whether a paper or digital version, whatever the form of your communication support, our skills, focused on the XML DITA data format, structure your data in order to increase your response times and your capacity to (re)use your content, and so provide quality work while optimizing costs.
Our mastery of the production process for 2D and 3D illustrations enriched by digital models makes it possible for us to guide and support our customers in new educational and global content, free of language barriers.
With great mastery of the tools used in the desktop publishing chain, our graphic artists guide you in your choice of theme to ensure the most appropriate communication support.
According to your goals, our experts will accompany you from the design of the document architecture to the relevant input for your After-Sales or Customer Care portals.
Training
Job training
Train your teams with our document engineering experts.
The learning curve of your teams is central to our concerns, which is why 4D CONCEPT has set up a rich and tailor-made training offer favoring proximity (small groups) and practical situations (reflection and practical work). On your premises, in our offices in the Paris region or through distance training, we adapt our programmes to your DITA projects.
Adapted for each project conducted on behalf of our customers, our standard DITA offer is as follows:
- DITA: Introducing the standard
· Understanding the structures and challenges of DITA
- DITA : Formation pratique
· Mastering the standard and producing with DITA
DITA FACTORY training
Train your teams with our DITA FACTORY and DTP experts.
Although intuitive and easy to use, the modules of the DITA FACTORY documentation workshop explain user, configuration and administration interfaces that require a learning effort.
We propose to our customers a course adapted to the roles defined in the recommended architecture, personalized according to the scope of their DITA FACTORY project:
- Writer using DITA Author and DITA Manager
- Manager or validation roles using DITA Manager
- Designers or DTP operators using InDesign or InDesign Server and the associated plug-in (optional, for ADOBE InDesign users only).
- DITA Manager Administrator
Guidance and support
The success of your project depends on the involvement, empowerment and training of your teams. Your teams must learn new tools and methods. In order for all your employees to buy into your DITA project, they must be able to measure what it contributes. We inform and involve your teams to guarantee the success of your project with the DITA FACTORY CCMS
The support process created by 4D CONCEPT, based on the participation of several people with various skillsets and perspectives, at the Customer’s and at 4D CONCEPT, is backed up by extensive lessons learned and the possibility of mobilizing key external participants, who represent the jobs involved.
Our knowledge in this field is based on the implementation, piloting and monitoring of the main stages of change (a variant methodology of John Kotter’s precepts):
- Understanding the sense of urgency
- Creating a steering team
- Formulating a strategic vision with our clients
- Communicating the vision throughout the life of the project
- Involving employees for long-term action
- Generating quick wins using useful and visible features
- Consolidating gains and producing more change
- Institutionalizing the new measures in the company culture
4D CONCEPT organizes training and coaching according to the different milestones of the project, thus reinforcing the impact of the practical work.
- A direct relationship with the actors of the project at the customer’s site: interviews, human analysis, training, personalized support of the business teams. The actors can define training needs to facilitate access to the new system.
- Brings together a user community when drawing up the initial specifications, including experiential feedback from 4D CONCEPT and external consultants if necessary. These meetings take the form of practical workshops.
- Our customers can ask us to organize direct meetings with another client panel from the same industry branch or another industrial sector.
Publishing chain and digitization
As part of setting up a publishing chain project, 4D CONCEPT offers an audit and analysis phase of its customer’s operating needs. Such an audit phase relies on interviews to set up the human analysis part of the change project. Such analysis makes it possible to measure skill levels and thus to position the right communication channels and, if necessary, to plan the right training and skills transfers.
4D CONCEPT highlights the defining features of the change and identifies the various participants and their ways of working during the change. We use this information to define the communication plan associated with the change project.
From these analyses, we develop an overall strategy that includes the entire set-up and roll-out of the change project. Together, we develop the business processes and links, thus encouraging acceptance of the change.
4D CONCEPT‘s feedback from lessons learned in setting up its systems allows us to identify quickly the early warning signs of a conflict and include them in prevention plans as soon as possible.
4D CONCEPT can also work as a consultant, pilot and/or service provider during the production phase.
AGILE project and method
Tell us about your project and we will guide you on two approaches that can also be combined.
Our experience in integration on specific projects shows that projects that require dividing up or that extend more than 6 months are more particularly adapted to the Agile SCRUM or even AGILE SAFe methods.
Short projects allow for global and fixed price approaches, but only if the scope is precise and fixed at the start of the project.
Give yourself the right to make some mistakes avoiding issues.
AGILE methodology
The AGILE methodology is a set of software engineering best practices implemented on roll-out and integration projects.
The AGILE methodology advocates four core values around which the project monitoring and application development are based:
- Communication
- Working software at the heart of discussions
- Customer involvement
- Acceptance of change (flexibility)
The application of the methodology provides many benefits of different kinds:
- Improved development quality
- Improved customer visibility of the project’s progress
- Improved response time in project decisions that minimize risks
