What is Content Operations and Why is it Important?

Content is central to connecting with users, promoting brand awareness, and achieving company-wide goals. However, as content scales and multiple teams contribute to content production — each with their own tools — this process becomes increasingly complex. To address these challenges, organizations are turning to content operations or content ops to streamline content creation, optimize workflows, and ensure consistency across multiple channels.

In this article, we’ll outline the role and key components of content operations, discuss its challenges and benefits, and outline the essential elements companies must consider to get started.

What is Content Operations?

Content operations refer to the processes, stakeholders, and technologies that a company uses to manage their content’s lifecycle in alignment with larger business objectives. This framework includes content strategy development, creation, publication, delivery, and management. Content operations are important because they impact how end users interact with each company’s information and documentation — something that can make or break the customer experience. Making connections with and providing value to users is a core incentive for companies, underlining the relevance of a more operational framework.

What is the Role of Content Operations in
Content Management and Strategy?

An organization’s content strategy outlines the plan for how various teams intend to achieve their goals from defining target audiences to detailing approach tactics and analyzing results.

Content operations focus on execution. They determine which actions, tools, and teams work together at each stage of the content workflow to implement the strategy. This includes the practical actions needed to develop, distribute, and enhance content. Since operations manage processes, teams look for opportunities to optimize or automate them.

A core subdivision of these operations is content management. It refers to the high-level view of what content is in production, who the audience is, where teams will publish each content, and whether there are any roadblocks. It also includes follow-up content analysis and optimization to enhance operational efforts; however, compared to content operations, management leaves more room for individual project needs rather than solely focusing on efficiency. Successful content management is central to enhancing team productivity, reducing time and money spent on redundant efforts, and continuously delivering relevant, quality content to users.

What’s the Role of a Content Operations Manager?

Content Operations Managers oversee the full content production process to ensure teams produce content efficiently and support company-wide goals. They achieve this through the management of the people, technologies, and processes involved in executing a company’s content strategy. Day-to-day supervision of the content lifecycle may include various responsibilities:

• Track the content calendar to follow content production, content management, and results
• Seek opportunities to optimize workflows, reduce bottlenecks, and build replicable processes
• Test and integrate new technologies into their systems to improve efficiency and team autonomy
• Oversee security procedures, content governance, and the application of company policies
• Set key performance indicators (KPIs), analyze results, and research target audience needs

Note that for product documentation teams these responsibilities may fall under roles such as the Head of Product Knowledge or Head of Documentation.

Components of Content Operations

There are four core components to managing content ops: people, processes, technology, and analytics. Let’s take a look at what teams need to consider within each element.

People

People are the base of content operations — be it end users influencing content strategies based on their needs or documentation teams and SMEs working together to report information. The first step in managing people is to define roles and responsibilities. Peer-to-peer collaboration runs smoother and reduces interpersonal conflict when teams avoid the overlap of missions and clarify the scope and goals of each position.

Processes

With the right people in place, the next step is establishing processes that facilitate consistency, seamless collaboration, and accountability. In content operations, this includes processes such as:

• Defining how to extract expert information from SMEs to include it in documentation
• Developing style guidelines and templates
• Determining how to publish content from various sources to multiple endpoints
• Harmonizing content for a consistent experience
• Establishing update and approval workflows

Technology & Tools

For people to successfully navigate these processes and produce quality documentation, they need the right technology stack. Without the proper resources available, content operations will face delays and blockages leading to reduced team efficiency and a lower-quality user content experience. Ensure your teams have access to tools for authoring, quality assurance, project management, digital asset management, collaboration, and analytics.

Analytics

What good is producing vast quantities of documentation if you have no idea how useful it is to the audience you’re writing for? Clarify your content’s impact with dedicated documentation metrics. These analytics facilitate data-driven decisions which companies report increase their operational productivity rates to 63%.

Common Content Operations Challenges

Updating your business’ content ops is highly important. Yet, many companies face similar challenges to the ones mentioned below.

Managing Multiple Formats and Platforms

Several teams contribute to the content production process, each with their own approach. Some documentation teams have tried to reduce bottlenecks and manual work to harmonize content by encouraging all teams to write and manage content in a central system, like a CCMS. However, most teams prefer to stick to their own tools, leading to content silos and scattered product knowledge.

With each team having unique content needs, a variety of writing and publishing tools are now in use – Paligo CCMS, Madcap Flare, Author-IT, Confluence, Adobe FrameMaker, Microsoft Word, and more. These tools produce a range of content types, from unstructured text to structured documents, and each one supports different export formats. As a result, this increases the risk of inconsistencies and inefficiencies.

Scaling Documentation for Agile Development Cycles

Agile development is a flexible, adaptive project management method commonly adopted by software development teams. It focuses on people and how collaboration allows cross-functional teams to navigate any context to advance in their projects. It typically includes a set of frameworks and practices, including Scrum, Kanban, Feature-Driven Development, sprints, stand-ups, and more.

By bringing agility to documentation, software and technical documentation teams can adopt shared practices and synchronize their release cycles. However, tighter collaboration also introduces new challenges. Agile documentation needs to constantly adapt to align with changing requirements, features, and priorities. Traditional documentation production methods and tools aren’t made to keep up with the fast pace and flexibility of agile workflows.

Ensuring Content Relevance and Freshness

As user needs evolve, bugs are fixed, and new product versions launch, teams must update content. This is especially critical for software documentation as the release cycle for software companies is increasingly quick. If users face problems with the latest version of a product, but the documentation doesn’t contain the freshest, most relevant information to fix the issue, they will be frustrated with their product experience.

Without rethinking the content development process, teams risk sharing end documentation with users that contains errors or that is missing information. As a result, companies may experience mistrust, and, potentially, product downtime.

Maintaining Content Governance

Companies need to ensure their content is monitored, secure, and accessible to the right people. From inadequate access controls to poor version management and inconsistent security measures, content ops must be aware of and mitigate several governance pitfalls to provide a consistent, quality experience while protecting sensitive information.

What are the Benefits of Efficient
Content Operations?

After mitigating these commonly-faced challenges, companies stand to benefit. Discover the top advantages of optimizing content ops below.

Improved Content Consistency and Quality

Well-defined processes are a cornerstone of content operations. They provide directions for producing consistent content that meets a high standard of accuracy and quality. From content reuse features to providing a consistent user experience across endpoints and measuring the performance of content, content operations ensure the right teams have access to the relevant tools to optimize the quality of their outputs.

Reduced Time and Money Spent

One of the main goals of content operations is to optimize the relationships between people, technology, and processes — in other words, make the content workflow more efficient. The more efficient operations are, the less time and money teams spend crafting, approving, and publishing quality content.

Faster Content Delivery Aligned with Product Releases

Normal content production questions around what format to use, which SMEs to get information from, and what the editing process looks like are no longer issues. Optimizing the content workflow means timelines are clear and realistic, and teams stay on schedule. Plus, by integrating agile documentation processes, it’s easy for teams to align content delivery to product releases.

Key Elements for Effective
Content Operations

To enjoy the benefits of content operations, there are several core components that companies must consider and put in place.

Implement a Consistent Content Strategy

The first step in establishing comprehensive, effective content operations is to determine your strategy. More importantly, companies need to align their strategies, so all content objectives are cohesive with their larger business goals. To do this, teams must understand and analyze how their internal and external content efforts impact other business units. By aligning goals and resources, a unified content ops strategy results in optimized ROI and a positive user experience.

Elaborate a Content Reuse Strategy

Reuse strategy refers to how teams determine which content components they can recycle and reuse in other content types across channels. This reduces the volume of content companies need to produce, therefore increasing production velocity. Within reuse strategies, organizations also need to identify which content is largely reusable yet still requires certain adjustments for delivery to dedicated audiences. According to Sarah O’Keefe from Scriptorium Publishing, organizations can typically expect about 20% of their content to qualify for reuse opportunities. She further explained that this number can reach 80% for industries with large content volumes and overlap between products, like the semiconductor sector.

This mixing and matching existing content with new elements reduces content costs and improves productivity as teams don’t need to take as much time for editing, approval, and translation processes.

Create a Centralized Content Repository

Investing in centralizing content into a common hub is essential for companies looking to scale their content operations. Content repositories play a key role in managing omnichannel content delivery, another essential part of content operations. This is because once teams update a piece of content, the updated information needs to be instantly available to users across relevant channels. However, information is often scattered across content sources and with each new endpoint, teams must spend additional time interconnecting and cross-feeding content to the relevant places. Any new sources or endpoints only increase the complexity of this process exponentially.

To manage this tangled web and avoid inconsistent user experiences, businesses need an intermediary solution to create a centralized content repository. These hubs of information allow content operations teams to consolidate all content in a single location before connecting the content to each delivery point (e.g. knowledge base, CRM, website, AI applications like chatbots, etc.).

Leverage the Right Tools

Gathering the best people and putting the right processes in place doesn’t matter without a solid tool stack to back them up. Depending on your business and strategy, there are different kinds of tools that may be valuable.

Content Authoring and Management Tools:

Writers from across teams have flexible solutions to create diverse, comprehensive documentation. This includes authoring tools, content quality assurance tools, editing tools, and more.

• Examples: CMS, CCMS (e.g. Paligo, Madcap IXIA , Author-it,…), oXygen XML Editor, Acrolinx, etc.

Developer Documentation Tools:

For software companies, developers need a specific set of tools where they can write code in different programming languages, collaborate on projects, and share content.

• Examples: Confluence, GitHub, Read the Docs, Doxygen, etc.

Project Management Tools:

Team leads and project managers use specific tools to help maximize efficiency, organize tasks, centralize project information, and facilitate collaboration within content operations.

• Examples: Jira, Notion, Asana, Trello, Monday, etc.

Content Delivery Platforms:

Once teams have created and edited their documentation, they must still deliver the content to all endpoint applications. Content Delivery Platforms (CDP) gather content in a centralized content repository and unify it no matter the initial source and format. They then feed the content to all delivery points (e.g. website, documentation portal, CRM, knowledge base, help desk, AI chatbot, etc.).

• Examples: Fluid Topics

Analytics Tools:
Just because content is live and accessible to users, doesn’t mean the workflow is done. Teams still need to track metrics and use analytics tools to extract insights into how users interact with the company and how effective the content is.

• Examples: Independent analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics, SEMrush…) and documentation tools containing dedicated content analytics (e.g. Fluid Topics), etc.

Embrace Cross-Functional Collaboration

Designing clear workflows and streamlining processes facilitates smooth communication and collaboration between writers, developers, designers, and other stakeholders. This is essential for helping content advance through each stage of the lifecycle. The workflows will further support positive collaboration efforts for teams who prioritize transparency and efficiency.

Uphold Strong Governance

Within content governance is the establishment of consistent content rules, style guidelines, quality assurance processes, and accessibility requirements. Each of these elements ensures teams maintain a high level of editorial standards.

Conclusion

Optimizing content operations requires managing the people, processes, and tools involved. With the right elements in place, they overcome common challenges and make way for valuable benefits. From dynamic delivery to dedicated documentation metrics and its secure by design platform, Fluid Topics offers the features and functionalities needed to overcome the challenges outlined earlier. Our leading AI-powered Content Delivery Platform is a key component to developing a competent, robust content operations playbook.

Content Operations FAQs

What is a Content Operations Platform?

Content operations platforms are collaborative digital spaces where teams can track the progress of documentation projects, approve or deny changes, manage content, and track results. These software solutions are essential to smooth operations.

What is a Content Operations Framework?

A content ops framework identifies the people, processes, tools, and metrics a content operations manager needs to implement and adopt to successfully execute a content strategy. Developing a comprehensive system that works together seamlessly without creating bottlenecks can be a challenge. The framework outlines the exact steps of how to plan, create, and manage content for organizational success.