At The Hartford, business user procedures were written in Microsoft Word and published to the central library in .PDF. Although accessed through a web browser, the .PDFs took a significant amount of time to open on the user’s machine, a delay that is critical for call center users (whose performance is measured by a number of time-dependent metrics). In addition, links between documents didn’t work as well as they could, and using Word didn’t scale for future document development.
Before my team could switch to authoring in HTML, however, we had to justify to senior management the purchase of Dreamweaver, our chosen development tool, as well as detail the benefits we’d achieve by switching from Word to HTML. With input from my team, I created this SARIE (situation-alternatives-recommendation-implementation-evaluation) document that described these benefits and the reasoning behind our selection of Dreamweaver.
By providing this full justification, we proved that we’d completely researched the situation and management approved our purchase. We switched to authoring all new content in HTML, giving us the flexibility and scalability we need for future development as well as decreasing document load times and increasing ease-of-use for our business users.