My localisation swan song! Following Corel's closure announcement, Localisation Ireland asked me to write a reflective piece on the state of localisation and the lessons learned in Corel.

After 9 years in the localisation business, I am still surprised - and perhaps as little unsettled - by the number of people who continue to think it is nothing more than an engineering exercise. Few, it seems, appreciate or understand the role of Localisation Managers and Program Managers and their contribution to a successful localisation.

Two recent events bear this out.

By the time you have read this, Corel will probably have closed down its localisation operations in Dublin. When the initial transition discussions started (to relocate the operations back to Ottawa), the questions focused primarily on the engineering aspects of our products. In Dublin, we quickly realised they were assuming that knowing the engineering aspects automatically gave them a localisation competence.

Localisation, after all, is just about manipulating files, right?

From an operations perspective, engineering, testing, online and printed documentation and translation probably consume the most hours. But from a strategic perspective, the management of the localisation business units, and the various projects, has the most impact on whether the project succeeds or not.

In Corel, and I don't think other companies are that different. Localisation Managers spent quite a bit of time just working with the business units trying to identify what needed to be localised. Sometimes this meant pushing back on the business units who wanted anything that moved to be localised, while on other occasions the Localisation Managers brought a dose of realism to the business units' plans.

Like manufacturing, localisation has to satisfy and negotiate many tradeoffs between its various stakeholders. Caught between the countries, who want it all now, and the business units who have limited budgets, localisation management rapidly becomes engaged in negotiations, not engineering. Throw in OEM demands, customised builds, and pressures to deliver beta builds to tradeshows, and it becomes a more potent mix.

Localisation is often at its best when it caught up in this stakeholder conflict: it creates an opportunity for localisation to add significant value to the company's value chain. Localisation can become the glue which pulls the various stakeholders together.

An example: When Corel Dublin started out, the parent organisation did not believe in sim-ship, ignoring the demands of the countries for faster localisations. It seems such an alien concept now, but Corel was comfortable with the notion that it was acceptable to ship localised products up to 120 days after the English product. It was the attitude of a cash-rich company.

When we first proposed shipping CorelDraw, the flagship product , within 30 days, there was strong resistance to the idea. The message was "we are going to do nothing to help you: we are not going to jeopardise the English product".

So, taking the line that it was easier to beg forgiveness than ask for permission, we set out to achieve sim-ship without their involvement. We delivered the product in 24 days, in the last month of the financial year, just when Corel's revenues had started to nosedive. That release brought in an unexpected, and much needed revenues of about $5m.

It was the wakeup call Corel needed and from that point on sim-ship became the norm, with Dublin increasing the number of languages and products over the years.

Localisation, in this context, significantly changed Corel's business model. Our contribution could have ended there, but there was more work to be done. Although we were shipping our products to the market faster and faster, there was a clear disconnect between marketing and sales. Often, our products were hitting the shelves before marketing caught up.

We initiated product planning sessions, getting the functional units to meet on a regular basis to coordinate their activities. Success was moderate though, for as soon as we had got consensus on how to coordinate, the organisation was torn apart as it organisation pursued the Linux opportunity. Corel's CEO was betting the whole company on Linux - making it the central focus for development and marketing spend - at the expense of ignoring the cash cows (CorelDraw and WordPerfect) which were supporting the business.

Ultimately, this single focus proved to be Corel's downfall: the CEO resigned in July and his replacement quickly implemented a turnaround strategy which saw 400 layoffs in Ottawa and the closure of Dublin.

The ensuing transition highlights another aspect of Localisation Management that is often overlooked: the contribution of program/project managers and the amount of coordination needed to get a project out the door.

This has been the biggest lesson for the transition team. It was an activity they had seriously underestimated; after all, didn't program managers just liaise between engineering and quality assurance?

Then we point out the "little" things that domestic teams often overlook: such as third party files which haven't been localised; international bugs the domestic teams keep pushing back to the end of the queue, the constant push to get decisions made on the base product components so they can be localised in time, the legal agreements to distribute third-party software, chasing down the localised versions of the third-party because nobody thought to include it in the contract deliverables; and, of course, the making the crucial decisions on what updates to take.

All of a sudden, it looked like Localisation engineering has an easy time of it.

Fortunately, we had anticipated the problem and had prepared training programmes to raise their awareness. The transitions teams went back nervous, but with a lot more confidence in their ability to take on localisation.

In November, Dublin releases its last sim-ship - the release of Draw 10 in 4 languages - while Ottawa take on the final language - Brazilian Portuguese. The fact that staff can remain committed to the release, despite the redundancy, is testament not only to their professionalism but to that other essential competency in Localisation Management: team management.

Earlier, I mentioned two events. The second event was an interview with an American company planning to set up in Ireland. The job was to set up the operation in Dublin, but the interview focused on engineering aspects of software, with the interviewer, at one point, getting hung up on how a particular technical problem was fixed.

Worse, their initial view was to use Dublin to send out files for translation and then have them sent back to California to the base localisation team for integration into the product. There was no understanding of need for cross-functional work, nothing on how to influence an organisation, nothing on business planning, nothing on working with the various countries to identify the right product mix.