In episode 79 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bill Swallow continue their discussion and talk about solutions to quick fixes.
“A big part of your content strategy should be how requests come in, how the timelines are built, and what you’re responding to and how you’re responding to them in the first place.”
—Bill Swallow

Related links: 

* The true cost of quick fixes (podcast, part 1)

Twitter handles:

* @gretylkinsey
* @billswallow

Transcript:
Gretyl Kinsey:     Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we’ll be continuing our discussion on quick fixes, this time focusing on solutions. How can you undo quick fixes or better yet avoid them in the first place? This is part two of a two-part podcast. Hello and welcome everyone. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.
Bill Swallow:     Hi, and I’m Bill Swallow.
GK:     And today we’re going to be revisiting our previous discussion on quick fixes, but this time with a bit more of a positive spin. Just to recap a little bit from last time, what we mean when we talk about quick fixes are when you take a one off or bandaid approach to your content strategy, you do some sort of a work around to get content out the door, usually on a tight deadline or under a constrained budget, and then that later can cascade into lots of problems down the road if you have done a quick fix instead of planning and doing things the right way. And where I want to start things off today, talking about how you can undo or avoid quick fixes, if your company decided to use a quick fix in the past, what are some reasons that you might need to change that now?
BS:     Well, I think one of the first things that you should be looking at is the amount of time your team is spending on overall tasks and to see exactly how much time is being spent fighting with, or otherwise futsing with their content development tools. Are they going in and constantly having to reformat things? Are they constantly having to retag things? Are they fighting with the tool to get it to work the way they need it to? And looking at these types of things to figure out, do I have a problem with quick fixes? Did we implement things correctly? Are we using the tool the way we should be using the tool, and is the tool right in the first place?
GK:     Yeah, absolutely. And I think this kind of touches on the flip side of the scenario that we talked about in the previous episode, where we mentioned things like template abuse and tag abuse, and people going outside those parameters that you have defined in your structure or in your template and doing these one off quick fixes for formatting. So if you realize that you’re spending a whole lot of time on those kinds of things, then suddenly that’s not really a quick fix. That’s a very time consuming fix when you put all of those little individual quick fixes together. So if you realize that you’ve got a lot of writers doing that, then that can lead to something like a limitation down the road. If you realize, for example, “Hey, we really need to streamline templates that we have, or we need to introduce a new template or a new publishing output that is a lot more sleek and efficient than what we’ve already got,” and you’ve got writers all over the place breaking the existing templates, then suddenly they’re imposing a limitation unnecessarily on the tools that you have.
BS:     Yep.