What’s Wrong with PowerPoint as a Document Authoring Tool?

In our McCulley/Cuppan consulting work we recently had a new client invite us to work with an authoring team on applying best practice to the planning, writing, and reviewing of a regulatory submission document. The document was going to be a significant piece of work, requiring over 500 pages and involving multiple authors across several scientific disciplines.

At the first meeting, the project leader announced she wants to continue the use of PowerPoint (PPT) as the document planning tool. Reasoning for this approach was in part because she and other team members already invested considerable time and effort in generating a 540+ slide deck representing data and messages to be in the regulatory document and PPT was a very familiar tool from extensive use in developing presentations.

I have to say we were mildly surprised by the demand to use PPT as the primary tool to plan and outline such a large, complex document. We have encountered other organizations using PPT for document planning purposes, but never on such a large scale. On the surface, the choice of PPT as the tool to produce initial draft documents seems reasonable. It is familiar to many, provides an authoring environment that produces output that can appear on screen as an outline, can be commented on in oral or remote review, and can be easily augmented and updated. All of these apparent benefits would support an argument for using PPT as an outlining tool to plan any and all documents. However, the use of this tool does not readily scale to developing large, complex technical documents.

Christine Haas, Karen Schriver, Thomas Huckin, Edward Tufte, and others tell us much about how readers interact with and read texts. From this collective body of work we have learned some things that can help us produce texts in an effective manner that, equally, is perceived as of very high quality. The prime method is to use tools that enable the design and review of texts as you expect your readers to engage in the reading and analysis of the text.

Successful collaborative authoring is significantly rooted in careful and thorough front-end planning. Choices of authoring tools are among the critical aspects of the document planning process, as tool choices impact (enabling or constraining) every other aspect of the planning and documentation processes. As authors and managers of authors, it is incumbent upon all of us to choose tools that accommodate our desired set of outcomes. Authors and managers must be cognizant of authoring tools that accommodate not only themselves and their ways of working, but others as well.

It is our position that use of PPT for document planning negatively impacts all potential collaborative authoring and review outcomes. Our claim assumes that the goal of the work is to generate an effective document, economically produced, that meets or exceeds end-user expectations.

I have outlined here key advantages and disadvantages of using PPT to plan and facilitate documentation of a multi-year, complex pharmaceutical development work.

PPT Advantages

• use is a habituated format; it’s familiar.

PPT Disadvantages

• presentations constrain data reporting rather than facilitate collaborative/interpretive processes (see my previous blog post on PowerPoint presentations).
• format creates/maintains a huge but fragmented vision of the process and product, impacting output (see Schriver and Tufte).
• PPT does not scale well to large documents as it limits information organization and searching is cumbersome, impacting review and the authors' ability to migrate material from PPT into a document-based format.
• PPT presentations do not accommodate major revisions/reorganization; impacting logic, content, and organization of the ultimate document product (see Schriver).
• the output decreases in clarity as the number of slides increases, impacting author/reviewer interpretation (see Tufte).
• PPT output is not a document; conversion to MS Word format is inefficient, time-consuming, and expensive.

The point seems clear in the choice of using PPT as an authoring tool is that familiarity wins, despite that, from a business, work, or quality perspective, the disadvantages of PPT clearly outweigh this single advantage. Eschewing proven document authoring platforms for the familiar may have unintended consequences and bear a high tariff.

Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog

How Do You Know When Good is Good Enough?

How do you know when good is good for any document you may produce?

I ask this question in every workshop I facilitate. Generally the response is a head nod followed by the comment "Yes, that is the question.....I wish I had the answer." There is the rub. We rarely sit back and consider the notion of what attributes we need in place to have a high quality communication product. 

Often we will work on a document until we run out of time (I am convinced the only marker used by the majority of people authoring documents in the pharmaceutical or medical device world is time.) We do this because we have not defined what document quality "is."

Defining document communication quality means developing expectations or standards of quality. Standards can be applied at the level of an individual, team, or an organization. Defined standards or definitions of quality are prerequisites for measuring quality. If standards don’t exist, they must be designed.

Standards are explicit statements of expected quality. They may apply to writing and reviewing practice as well as to the document product. In terms of writing, document standards communicate expectations for how a particular document will communicate to the user what is to be known or to be done. In essence the standards establish the parameters that ensure a document achieves the desired results.

Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog

The McCulley/Cuppan Standards Development Process We Use with Our Clients

As I mentioned in a previous post, in our McCulley/Cuppan consulting work we find the prevalent standards used to determine the “success” of a document are largely driven by simple measures of accuracy and then a passel of “home brewed” concepts for characteristics of document that are largely idiosyncratic ideas about what matters to the reader.

When you have 10 people reviewing a document you will end up with at least 12 opinions about the quality of the document (incongruous number is intentional as sometimes you have a reviewer offering more than one opinion that often conflict) and ways of describing quality that are all over the map. People use different terms to describe quality and if they actually use the same term, then it is highly unlikely that they will use the same definition for the term. So the first problem faced in the review process is the vocabulary used to describe quality attributes in a document.

When writers and reviewers compose or edit text, they continually make decisions that concern semantics—the meaning their words convey—and syntax—the way the words are arranged and other structural elements of the document. However, writers and reviewers often base these decisions on assumptions that have not been tested with technically-oriented adult readers or complex, data-rich, technical documents. Worse yet is many assumptions have never been tested to determine validity. Thus, there are actions ordered by writers and reviewers that may not in fact have the expected effects on a readers' performance (we know this is certainly true with one very important reading audience for pharmaceutical and medical device companies—the regulatory agency, like FDA). So the second problem faced in the review process is to understand what document elements have a meaningful impact on semantics and where to focus time and attention on the syntactical elements of a document.

The first thing we do with a client is an examination of the terms used formally (such as in guidance documents) and informally (such as review comments in documents) to describe quality. This will give us a sense of how the organization views quality and how sophisticated they may be in trying to create a common platform that describes document quality for the organization.

The second thing we do is to provide clients with the terms McCulley/Cuppan uses to describe document quality and why the concepts underlying these terms are extremely important to help determine document communication quality. A very important consideration is that the terms should speak the user’s language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms.

We spend a huge amount of time talking about semantics. The term "semantics" refers to the study of how language conveys meaning. Using a broad definition of semantics, we help our clients learn how to focus on different features of a document. Features like word choice, the position of information in document sections, paragraphs and in documents as a whole, idea importance, and the visual representation of data.

Then we work with a client team to create and vet working definitions for the various quality standards.

We then roll out the standards in a workshop setting and show people how the standards are applied to the types of documents they have and will produce.


Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog