From 2022-2023, I managed ROAR Magazine, an online magazine produced by the Translation and Localization Management program at MIIS. Although ROAR had existed for years as a podcast before, the magazine component only just launched with my onboarding in 2022, and along with my other classmates, Harlyn Lane and Popeye Lin, we helped shape the magazine’s content direction and processes from scratch.
This experience helped me improve many different skillsets across areas such as stakeholder management, outreach, and team communication, and one area that I wanted to highlight in particular for this post is process-building and creating structure, as this was something I worked a lot on for the magazine. See the 1 minute video summary below and/or read on for more:
Starting Out
At the beginning, we were very eager to start sourcing articles and writing content, but we quickly saw that we would need a system to organize everything or else our work would become chaotic. How could we set things up to be able to find each article-in-progress quickly? How would we keep track of editing? How would we keep track of the kind of content we were pushing out each month?
After discussing amongst ourselves, we decided that a two editor system for each article would be best to ensure quality, and I also suggested one last “finalization” step be added where the authors themselves could do a last quick check before the article was uploaded (to give them a chance to confirm their original intentions still came through after the edits). I took this rough workflow and made a shared Excel sheet out of it that we could use to organize our content for every month’s issue:
Through this sheet, the articles for each month could be easily accessed through a single click, each piece of content was clearly labeled with one of four different content categories, and I set up the cells so that each major step in the workflow – editor 1, editor 2, and author finalization – would have a cell that was initially red, but conditionally formatted to turn green once someone entered a date in the adjacent column indicating completion of the task. By making a template we could reuse, the structure was set for being able to keep track of each monthly magazine issue’s progress.
Facilitating Repeatability
Although the Excel sheet to keep track of articles set the rough structure for one process, there were many other things to consider in order to make the entire beginning-to-end workflow more repeatable.
The first was drafting a general timeline. When we initially went through the process for our first couple monthly issues, we knew the end publish date that was our final deadline (the 10th of the month), but we were somewhat playing it by ear during editing, finalizing, and uploading the articles because we didn’t have a feel for what the timeline should be – which I think is fine, given we had never done it before. But, in order to mitigate any risks of not being able to release on time in the future, I created a rough timeline detailing tasks in our workflow and about how far in advance each should be done before the monthly release:
The timeline is partly based off team observations of steps that took longer than expected in the first two releases, where more time was purposely built into those steps to allow for flexibility. For example, although we had lined up editors for all of our articles in advance, we encountered problems with those editors going missing and not responding to communications – which was a learning experience in itself for our team in figuring out the best ways to follow up and discuss backup plans – so the soft deadline for having editors finish was set at 1 week before release, rather than just a few days before. This provided padding so that even if things ran behind schedule, we wouldn’t have too much trouble still having the finalized article ready on time.
In addition to having a repeatable workflow for the overall process, we also needed repeatability for some individual steps that have lots of small details. For example, we paste our articles into our WordPress site as one of the last steps, and there are many small things to pay attention to such as scheduling the post in advance for a certain date/time, adding the appropriate categories/tags, etc. To have a guide for ourselves as well as future team members down the road, I wrote instructions for this with accompanying screenshots in a process document, part of which can be seen below:
After uploading articles to the site for the November 2022 issue, we reviewed how everything went as a team, and one of the suggestions our marketing lead made was that we could add a featured image and excerpt to each post to customize the “post preview”. We agreed to incorporate this, and it was then added to the process document (step 4 in the screenshot above). Documenting processes as you do things for the first time is super important to standardize how everyone goes about doing tasks, but it’s also essential to always be revising as processes are adjusted!
Making Things Smoother
Throughout the past few months, there were also some organizational things that we improved to make our work go just that little bit more smoothly.
For example, we use Teams as our shared space to upload files that our team can all access, and the initial way we set up our folder structure for article content was changed after seeing how cluttered it started to become. We initially had organized our content pieces into folders by the category type they were, but after just a couple months, it became difficult to quickly locate a specific document in the large number of files in the folders:
Although we could have explored other options like making subfolders for “Fall ’22”, “Spring ’23”, we ultimately decided that organizing by the issue month the content was being prepared for was best for balancing the ease of finding an article quickly with the number of folders we had to click through to get to that article:
One other way we improved efficiency was through templatizing emails. As we are trying to shift towards using our new ROAR email as the primary means of communication with external stakeholders, we will be sending out emails for each of the main workflow steps – asking a potential author to write (if we are the ones doing outreach), asking editors to edit, and asking authors to do finalization on their articles – and thought it would be beneficial to have email templates for these steps. Of course, personal emails could be better depending on the person, but in the case we are low on time, these serve as an easy way to make sure we’re sending all the necessary information.
Looking Forward
So now that a lot of the basic structure for the magazine was set, what was next?
- Revising processes based on how our December 2022 issue went (just released at the time of this post). For example, we ran into a new situation with multiple articles where it was only decided during the editing process that the article needed to be majorly rewritten, causing delays/issues with the originally planned timeline due to having to go through multiple steps a second time. These happened with articles submitted externally (as opposed to ones where we discussed the article’s direction with the author before it was written), so we can discuss how to adapt our processes to account for this better going forward.
- Expanding upon the documentation foundation we built. There were still many areas in which we could flesh out documentation – for example, writing down clear role responsibilities for ourselves and for others in the rest of ROAR as it is pertinent to the magazine such as marketing’s involvement in our monthly issue cycle, or expanding upon editing and content creation guidelines we had recently made.
- Further develop our overarching strategy, incorporating metrics as needed. We would like to grow our presence and collaborate with more professionals to expand our network, and now that a lot had been done our core operations, we could brainstorm as team how to bring the magazine to the next level. One avenue we could explore, for example, is by taking a deeper dive into our reach and engagement metrics on our posts (LinkedIn and WordPress both give these kinds of statistics), and we could analyze them in strategizing how to best expand our presence.
Overall, I was quite happy to see what our team could accomplish in a relatively short period of time. It was a blast being able to oversee all the great content that we’ve received from others, and I look forward to being able to interact with the localization industry even more going forward!
