Editorial process training

What editorial process training is

Editorial process training is the documented handover of a working content process to the people who will own it after I leave. Everything I have been doing — briefing, scheduling, chasing, editing, publishing, checking, reporting — is written down as procedures, then taught to your named people by having them run it under supervision until they are running it alone. It takes about six weeks.

This is the service that ends the relationship, on purpose. It is the natural end of content production management, and the reason that service keeps a written process document from the second month onwards: so that this one is a handover rather than an excavation. If you have never worked with me, this can still be bought on its own, but then the first two weeks are spent finding out what your process currently is.

Who this is for

An owner who has had the pipeline run for them, has watched it work, and has now hired or freed up somebody who can take it. Or a business where the person who ran content has resigned, and the process exists only in their head and their inbox. Or an owner who has decided that paying monthly for something this ordinary has stopped making sense, which is a reasonable conclusion and one I would rather you reach out loud.

You do not need this if there is nobody to hand it to. A documented process with no owner is a file, and files do not publish anything. If the person taking over can manage the process but cannot yet write to standard, the writing side is separate coaching and the two run well together. And if you want one procedure written down rather than a whole system taught, a single written procedure is the smaller, cheaper purchase.

What gets handed over

• The written process. Six to twelve pages: every stage from idea to published page, who owns it, how long they have, and what happens when they miss. Written as instructions somebody can follow, not as a description of how things generally go.
• The templates. The brief, the production schedule, the pre-publish check, the monthly report. The actual files, already filled in with your last real month, so the first one your person produces is a copy rather than a blank page.
• The decision rules. The judgements I have been making without asking you: what gets refreshed rather than rewritten, when a piece is killed, what is worth a photographer, what never goes out without the owner reading it.
• The contacts and the accounts. Writers, designers and anyone else in use, with what each is good at and what they charge, plus every login and shared folder, listed and transferred.
• The supervised runs. Your person runs one full cycle with me watching and saying nothing until afterwards, then a second one where I am only reachable, then a third I do not see until it is published.

What you get

A process manual that is yours. In your files, in editable form, naming your people rather than roles. Where it references a tool, it references the one you use.

Trained people, tested. At least one named owner and one named substitute, each of whom has run a full month unaided before the training is declared finished. One person who knows the process is not a handover; it is the same problem with a different name.

A short handover note. One page to you: what has been transferred, what your people are now doing unaided, and the two or three things I expect to slip first, so you know where to look in three months.

A closed account. At the end there is nothing outstanding and no retainer continuing quietly in the background. If you want me afterwards, you ask.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A specialist fastener supplier with thirty staff has had its pipeline run externally for fourteen months: four blog posts and one email a month, plus rolling updates to forty product pages. The owner hires a marketing coordinator and wants the work brought inside within the quarter.

Week one is the manual, drawn from the existing process document and a recorded walkthrough of a live month. Week two hands over the six contractor relationships and the schedule, and settles the one genuine gap: nobody has ever written down who approves a technical claim, which has been me asking the same engineer each time. Weeks three to five are the supervised runs. The coordinator briefs, chases and publishes the March cycle with me silent, misses one approval deadline, and adds a chase step to the manual herself, which is the moment the handover is actually working. Week six is the second unaided cycle and the handover note. Two things are flagged as likely to slip: the phone check before publishing, and the monthly report, because it is the one task with no external deadline attached to it.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who is taking it over, what already exists in writing, and when you want to be running it alone. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before the first week, including the manual, the templates and the three supervised cycles.
3. Documenting. Ten to fifteen working days. Recorded walkthroughs of the real process, the manual drafted, then read back and corrected by the people who will use it.
4. The supervised cycles. Three, over about a month, with my involvement reducing at each one until I am not involved at all.
5. The close. Accounts transferred, the manual filed where your team keeps things, the handover note sent, and the arrangement ends.

What it costs

Quoted after the first call as one fixed figure, because the size depends on how much of the process is already written down and how many people are being trained. It is not one of the published monthly bands, since it is a project with an end rather than a standing arrangement; the pricing page shows the four usual ways of working for comparison. The figure is agreed in writing before anything starts, and it is cheaper for a business that has already been on a monthly arrangement, because half the document exists.

What happens next

Nothing, in the usual case, and that is the intended outcome. Where businesses do come back it is for one of three narrow things: a further procedure written up when the team adds work the manual does not cover, coaching on the writing itself if the process now runs but the drafts are thin, or a quarterly look at the plan once a year. Each is bought separately if it is wanted. The handover is complete on its own, and it is finished when your people are running the work without me.