Episode 5: Taming File Share Chaos

Explore the pros and cons of different file share systems and learn how to tame the chaos.

Transcript

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Let's talk about what happens beyond the manual. Hey everybody, welcome to another edition of Beyond the Manual. And today we actually get Beyond the Manual. So far in our journey, we've talked about all of the basics: how to create, publish, manage, what those things mean to each other, how to get a solid foundation for setting up your franchise library. Today we're going to talk about what happens when the project is done. Everybody came together, they were all excited about it. They knew that they wanted to put everything in one place and write down all of our SOPs, all of our standards, all of our best practices. And then when they're done, they all go off to their separate departments, separate silos. And what happens? For now, it's fine. Nobody ever creates a manual that's wrong. We got all these ideas out of our head onto paper. Now everybody can find it and we're ready to go. Except that's not quite true. Over time, everything changes. Systems mature, things evolve. Products come, products go, people change places. And this, as you've heard me say many times before, creates content chaos. So today we're gonna talk uh in a in a framework that an old mentor taught me that when you describe a problem and what happens if we don't solve the problem and before we can all agree on a solution, to talk about this like you're going to die. Chaos is death. So you're going to die, you're going to hell, it gets worse. But there is salvation to all of this. So, what happens when content chaos stagnates growth? And what happens when you try to solve that problem with either technology or a file share, let's get an LMS, and how it becomes worse. But there is salvation. So, first and foremost, chaos happens. It it just is. Everybody has chaos, everybody's going to die. It's a slow death. Sometimes it's not even painful, but it's there. As you grow, the the temptation is to simply add to what we have. We've we've now added an SOP. We have added a new phone number. We've added a new product, we've added a vendor. But almost never does somebody take something away. And that is a chaos agent. That's that's where chaos begins. Sometimes we want to do an SOP for a smaller unit, and we simply copy and paste an old version and then start again. But now we've got duplicate content. So chaos happens over time, and then it gets worse. Almost everybody wants their SMEs to do the writing. And look, we've got the technology to do that, buddy. Just write in Microsoft Word or use this Google Doc or give me your Excel spreadsheet. We distribute that, and I'm here to tell you that ain't nobody going to do it. SMEs don't do it. Content management is a full-time job done part-time by people who already have full-time jobs. Staring at a blank page, they're not writers, they're gonna put it off. They uh don't know how to create things. Once it's there, sometimes it's show up and throw up. Is it any good? They've got to publish to different platforms. So distributed authors become a little bit chaotic. Most brands that we've worked with recognize that, hey, maybe maybe we're a little all over the place. What we need is a file share system. Uh what we need is an LMS. What we need is a project management system so that construction flows. And now what you've done really is created more storage areas for the content that you're just creating without a plan by people who may or may not be any good at it. They have the knowledge, but they don't necessarily have the expertise. So one of the reasons why chaos is so prevalent is the propagation of technology. And technology is not a cure, technology is a digital solution for what is really an analog problem. Strategy and governance, two things that people don't really want to talk about, where they think we did the strategy up front. Those are critical to protecting your investment. And if you spent all that time and money to create something, then you should also spend a little bit of time to maintain it. So content management, full-time job done part-time by people who already have full-time jobs. So you're going to die, chaos, you're going to hell, propagation of platforms, chaos. But there is salvation. And salvation comes in the form of a librarian. And a librarian is a role, not necessarily a full-time person. In fact, most companies don't have a full-time librarian, though some do. The goal of the librarian is to support the SMEs, to make them better at what they do. The SMEs aren't going to think to update their information. They're not going to think of all the places where content lives, but the librarian can remind them. The librarian can say, have you checked this in a while? It's been a year. Are there any changes? If the answer is no, you're done. If the answer is yes, then the librarian helps work it through the silos, making sure that all departments are aware, works it through the workflow, works it through the approval flow, but then also tells the author, the SME, where it should be published. We put all of the training stuff on the LMS. Things that only are for franchisees, those go onto the file share where we where we restrict access to these things. The librarian's role is kind of an internal SME for your product documentation, for your SOPs, for your forms. They know where everything is, may not know everything about it, but they know how to name files so that they don't get lost. They make sure to archive things so that it doesn't clutter up your storage areas. They make sure to double check to make sure that they're fresh, that everything is findable. This person is a support role. It's critical to keeping chaos at bay, to making sure that you know where things are, that you don't have things that you no longer need. That's one of the biggest problems of chaos is that everything goes in, nothing ever comes out. You have SMEs dedicated to creating new content. But do you have anybody who's dedicated to removing old content? My experience says you don't. And that's okay as long as you know it. And when you know about a problem, if you know what causes things, then you can fix it earlier. Why does this matter? Chaos. Chaos is painful, and sometimes it's painful in ways that you don't necessarily notice. Uh FBCs, in again, in our experience, spend as much as four times four hours a week on sending PDFs or finding files to the franchisees. And that's time that they could better spend on helping them solve problems. How do I reduce food costs? How do I reduce labor costs? How do I deal with this this new competitor who has entered the market? How can I increase my marketing reach and therefore effectiveness? All of those things are what your support teams are supposed to do. So a librarian really is kind of a support team for the support teams. So you may be saying to yourself, how can I dedicate someone to this role when I'm in the early stages? We're running lean. Our operations people do training, they do marketing, they do support. We all wear many hats here. I get it. Large companies have the same problem. Profit matters. How do you dedicate somebody to a cost center instead of to a revenue center? Part of that is in how you think about this role. And if it if the librarian is a support person to the support people, you're actually freeing them up to focus on revenue, on cost savings, on support, on building the relationship. That's what they're meant to do. So this is a little bit more of an administrative role. The first thing to do though is to make someone accountable to it. So an operations manual, usually the vice president of operations, the person in charge of ops, is responsible for it. That's well and good. When you move into a construction manual, sometimes then we bring in a vice president of development, we have a marketing manual, we've got a training guide. Now sometimes we've got people who are in charge of those manuals, and that makes sense, but knowing what is across everything, knowing how to share the responsibility for style guide, for proofreading, for publishing to make sure that everything is together. What you need to do is set somebody accountable to all documentation so that your documentation is no longer siloed. The next thing then is to make someone responsible for just keeping eyes on things. This hasn't been updated in over a year. I noticed that we added a new vendor. Somebody should be in charge of change. Sometimes that change will come from the SMEs themselves and say we need to update, we need to add, but they can now they have someone to go to, and that someone can walk them through the process. So the first step is accountability. The second step is responsibility, put someone in charge of that. The third one then is to give that person the authority to do it. If we give that to, let's say, an intern or an admin assistant, that person has to chase down executive SMEs, busy people, I've got things to do, that's not important. How can you transfer the authority to that person so that this becomes important? It's a really important step in this. Otherwise, the the librarian feels like I keep saying it, but no one listens. Nothing ever gets done. I can't get them to review it. Them having the authority, having a pathway to overcome objections and obstacles internally is really critical for that. And it's a step that a lot of people miss. The last thing is to make this a part of your culture. Documentation is meant to be an asset, not a liability. And so many people and a lot of our more mature clients who come back to us and say that everything's a mess wind up chasing the problems. The the information becomes outdated, the the two different manuals conflict with each other. They they're always chasing that down. But if it becomes part of your culture, that if this information is updated, if it's easily findable, if it's accurate, and we condition franchisees, internal stakeholders to go here first, and they can find it, and it is useful, then that frees everybody up. And it becomes everyone's responsibility to keep the house clean. And they may not be the one to clean the house, but they can be the one to identify the problem and know what the solution is because they've got a librarian who's going to walk them through the change, publish, and manage process. And I'm going to encourage all of you to give your librarians a little bit of love. First, designate somebody. Second, give them some leadership support. Give them the authority because them chasing around SMEs all the time will be frustrating to them. So show your librarians a little bit of love and help to reduce the chaos so that you can protect the investment and safeguard the credibility that you've already built with your franchisees. Beyond the manual is a Manual Makers production. This episode was hosted by Brian Garner, directed by Chase Flacious, produced and edited by Charlotte Blow. Commentary by Lucia the Spanish Paella. Visit manualmakers.com for more resources. If you like what we're doing, please rate and review wherever you get your podcast.