Playbook Media
As part of the customer touchpoint program we're working on right now, we have a goal to deliver a set of guidelines that define the program policies, deployment and operational guidelines, terminology, brand direction, and so on. We should really call it a playbook, in line with various other corporate, erm, playbooks that we follow here at Sun, but our program manager feels a bit sick every time I say that word, so they are to be guidelines.
At present, they are just a framework and a table of contents, with names next to the major sections - the people we think might actually write the thing for us - so in a kind of transient state.
They really began life as a diagram of a phone tree and evolved from there. I'm sure the diagram was done on StarOffice Draw, but it might have equally been done with Visio or something similar. However, as we've determined the scope of the document (for it is still a document right now) and decided there needs to be a whole organization's worth of input, rather than just a diagram, its become a StarOffice Writer file. Which is fine. Except its not very interesting, of course. I mean, I can put the odd picture in there and ramp up the brand interface, but really, its just a text file. I had thought I might follow the style of the lovely brand identity guidelines that our splendid brand group puts together, but I'm not sure I can really work out what format it is (although it is published as a pdf). Its a beautifully constructed piece of work - concise, clear and direct - but I suspect its been developed on Quark or some super desktop publishing system by a super design agency over the course of 3 years, whereas I have 2 months and a budget of nil.
The real question I should be asking is who will be expected to follow these guidelines and what will work best for them? Its unlikely that if I present a 60 page StarOffice Writer file (even if I save it as a pdf with pictures in) that anyone will get past page 3 before they start flicking to the point that's relevant to just their daily operations. The trouble is, it's all the stuff on pages 3-10 that we really want them to understand. So, we're currently conducting interviews with our customer touchpoint community - representatives from around Sun who are really at the front line of customer interactions - to see just what they do right now, and what might work best for them in the future. We're not just asking about guidelines and standards - there's a whole other set of questions we don't know the answers to - but a key part of the interviews is to try and determine what best practices are already out there and what previous work has been done in this area.
It was in one of these interviews that it struck me that I was doing it all wrong. Not that the content of the guidelines is necessarily wrong, but that the way we are trying to present it and have it serve as an accessible resource just might be. And it was obvious what I should do instead. So today, I am.
Tunes: The Enemy: Had Enough
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