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Texas Department of Transportation
By Susan Tutt,
Online Information Services
Branch Manager,
General Services Division,
Texas Department of Transportation
Background
Information Mapping (IM) is at the heart of an interactive, online manual system at the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). Collectively, the set of 80 manuals represent a collaborative effort among technical writers, subject matter experts and policy-makers. The online manual presents policies and procedures with a user-friendly standard.
TxDOT began training employees in the Information Mapping method in the mid-1980s. A specific effort to review, evaluate and revise department manuals followed in 1988. In 1994, Information Mapping became a standard in the creation of manuals and word processing templates used for the electronic manual system. TxDOT continues to send about 20 employees each year to IM training. The agency’s on-going commitment to educating its staff in IM helped keep a workforce at ease in the maintenance of the policies and procedures.
Challenges
TxDOT faced four main challenges in creating this system:
Need for a Standardized Approach
TxDOT’s organizational structure equally distributes the responsibility of creating, implementing, and revising policy and procedure documents to more than 25 units. This collaborative effort made a standardized approach imperative.
Strive for Consistency
To ensure a corporate feel to department policy and procedure, TxDOT needed to create a standard structure across all manuals, both paper and online. The online publication staff cooperated with technical writers to create manual development standards. These standards, which are published in the agency’s online Communications Manual, are based primarily on the IM principles of chunking, labeling, and consistency.
Obtain Manager Buy-in
As a state agency, TxDOT is keenly aware of its responsibility as a steward of the taxpayer’s money. While taking advantage of the group-rate for training has been helpful, it has been a challenge to convince some managers that effectively written and easily understood manuals create savings. TxDOT met this challenge by educating managers of the risks and costs associated with decision-making based on poorly-written communications. A persistent, one-on-one effort helped to bring more technical writers to attend IM training.
Limited Staff Size
TxDOT Online Publications has a staff of three—a manager and two technical writers—to mentor manual developers on how to use the templates, publish the standards, convert word processing files into online manuals, distribute the manuals, develop an easy-to-understand user manual, and coordinate the IM training.
Solutions
Overcoming all the challenges required one common solution—equip technical writers with the necessary tool—the training in IM to create standardized policies, procedures, and communications. This approach included:
IM Learning Programs
TxDOT began hosting IM classes one to two times a year. Each session trained 20 employees. Students were urged to put the principals to use in their daily work, especially in developing usable policy and procedures.
Annual Writers' Clinics
Technical writers and their managers are invited to attend an annual Writers' clinic. The clinic serves as an information exchange among technical writers, managers and the online publications staff to improve the agency’s process of developing, publishing and maintaining manuals.
Workshops on using MS Word Templates
The publications staff, along with the template creator, hosted six workshops yearly. Attendees to the one-day workshop learned how to use a MS Word document template that provides all of the formatting for TxDOT’s manuals. The template itself is based on the IM principals of integrated graphics and accessible details. It also provides a consistent information structure for manuals.
Monthly Newsletters
Manual Pages, a monthly online newsletter targeted for users and developers of TxDOT manuals was created. Its content includes
- features on template
- writing tips
- updates on manual publication, and
- standards.
Results
The 80-volume online policy and procedure manual serves an internal audience of more than 14,000 employees. Any TxDOT employee with access to a networked computer can now access it. A smaller subset of 45 manuals is also available and used by an external world-wide community comprised of highway contractors, attorneys, consulting engineers, and lawmakers. (See http://manuals.dot.state.tx.us/dynaweb.)
Each manual contains valuable information for employees and external users who have business with TxDOT. The manuals are presented in a standardized manner, so learning to navigate through one means users can navigate through all the manuals. The manual system is essentially a comprehensive library of more than 13,000 pages of TxDOT policy and procedure information.
A majority of the manuals are distributed online only and are no longer printed, savings thousands of dollars each year. More importantly, there is a single source for department policy and procedure that is updated monthly—reducing liability and the possibility of duplicates or outdated information being available.
After researching many other Department of Transportation sites nationwide, there is no other system like TxDOT’s. Each manual is a part of the entire system – most other sites publish each book individually.
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