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Steve Shepard reports: <<We develop property management and accounting
software for large property management companies. These clients manage
millions of square feet of office space, retail space, residential units,
etc. Occasionally we get requests from clients for our docs to be provided
to them in Word format so they can customize them for their particular
workflow.>>
As you note, it's time consuming to convert documents into Word,
particularly if you then end up doing technical support on behalf of
Microsoft. You also introduce a large risk of losing important information
during the conversion process. The more serious issues you raise are that:
- You have no control over the quality of any subsequent work, which raises
complicated legal issues concerning liability. If they go through your
documents and strip out all the life-saving warnings and cautions to save
space and reduce printing costs, it's pretty clear that any resulting
injuries or deaths or financial disasters are their fault, but if they
self-righteously edit your materials to produce what they think sounds
better, liability becomes trickier: is it their fault because they changed
something, or your fault because your writing wasn't sufficiently clear to
let them make such changes safely?
- This is also giving away your work for free, as you've noted. I assume the
main reason why they want to customize the stuff is so that they can then
resell it and recoup some of their expenditures on your software, but that's
not necessarily a good assumption. Finding out why they want to customize is
an important step in coming up with a rational solution.
<<I am suggesting to my company... that we don't provide our copyrighted
material for editing. But, we do offer a service of customizing the
documentation to suit a client's needs and charge them accordingly. As long
as we can get the staffing we
need, it works out nice for us as we would actually be generating revenue.>>
That's an excellent suggestion, and it's certainly the way I'd go. If you
play up the legal liability issues, even pointy-haired managers should
understand the risk of surrendering the docs to amateurs, and combined with
the possibility of recouping some or all of the documentation costs, it
should be easy to persuade them that you have valuable services to sell.
Just one note: If you know anything about the SAP consulting business,
you'll know that despite the software's enormous power, there are loud
rumbles of discontent over the fact that proper installation of the software
often requires companies to retain expensive consultants. Don't piss off
your clients by charging so much to customize the documents that you lose
their good will, and perhaps their business.
One alternative that is extremely powerful, but difficult and potentially
risky to implement, involves developing some form of single-sourcing. If you
can clearly define the type of customization that's required, you may be
able to come up with a feasible means of doing the work that doesn't create
a maintenance nightmare (can you imagine the grief you'd have if you had to
maintain an entirely separate documentation set for each client?). For a
simple example, they may just want their company name splashed all over the
documents; in an ideal situation, all you'd have to do is insert a tag
<company name> and do a search and replace before shipping the documents,
then add the company name to the page header or footer. For a complex
example, some companies might want all the engineering instructions (e.g.,
managing HVAC systems) in a separate document from the accounting
information; this suggests some kind of content-management database that
lets you generate multiple documentation sets at (effectively) the click of
a button. Obviously, there are lots of intermediate situations. But the key
here is that once you start producing customized docs, each set then
requires maintenance, and that's not a trivial issue.
One final possibility to consider: Why do they want to do the customization?
You may discover that everyone wants exactly the same customizations, or
close enough to the same customizations that for all practical purposes, one
documentation set will satisfy everyone. In that situation, you may want to
simply redesign all your documentation to better fit the audience's needs.
If you do it right, you may not need to do any per-client customization
whatsoever.
<<If we absolutely want to provide the client with a editable version of our
docs, then charge them per page. And charge a lot.>>
See my previous comments. But if you adopt this approach, make sure you get
your nastiest lawyers to write an ironclad contract that basically says the
following: "We've spent countless hours and even more lives making sure our
information is perfect. A single change could result in the fall of western
civilisation as we know it and a new Dark Ages. If the client takes it upon
themselves to change a single comma in our documentation, they agree to
accept all blame and pay all legal expenses for any disasters that result.
And take us all out to lunch in apology. So there." <g>
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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