How to Repurpose IT Documentation and Get Away with It: Consistency in Voice
With so much value riding on tech documents, it’s important to communicate the right message.
We’ve all been there: a customer is looking for documentation that you just don’t have readily at hand. Then the idea strikes that you can simply reuse some documentation created for a previous project or repurpose vendor product documentation to your customer’s specific needs. But as someone who has sat on both sides of that table as a consultant and a customer, I can promise you that customers can tell when you’ve copied and pasted that PowerPoint.
This will make customers take your presentation and your recommendations as a professional less seriously. Nobody likes to feel like they’re being served reheated leftovers, and our customers are no different.
I had an IT Project Manager as a client who confided in me that he was quite familiar with our products’ documentation and would cast aside any documents provided to him that were similar in broad strokes to documents he had already seen. Many of our customers in ServiceNow Solutions do plenty of research on their own about ServiceNow as a platform before we ever talk to them. It’s our job as IT Consultants to ensure that the documents we provide bring value that’s specific to their unique needs, beyond what a visit to any internal wiki or a google search can offer.
But how can they tell? They know because of the inherent inconsistency in written voice that occurs when documentation is compiled from multiple primary and secondary sources. This blog post will describe what a written voice is and how to maximize the impact of both business and technical writing by using a consistent written voice