What We Offer
Technical Publications & Content Engineering Services
Overview
Technical Publications & Content Engineering
This is structured content work: building, migrating, and managing technical documentation in standards-compliant formats for organizations where documentation quality is mission-critical — aerospace programs, defense primes and suppliers, airlines and MROs, and industrial equipment manufacturers.
What we deliver:
- Maintenance manuals and operator documentation
- Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETMs / IETPs)
- Illustrated parts catalogs and wiring data
- Service bulletins and revision management
- Flight operations content (FCOM, MEL, performance data)
- Depot-level publications (DMWRs and NMWRs)
Standards we work with:
- S1000D (Issues 2.1 through the new Issue 7) — the international specification for technical publications in aerospace and defense
- MIL-STD-40051 — the U.S. Army standard for technical manuals, both the -1 (IETM) and -2 (page-based) parts
- MIL-STD-3001 — NAVAIR’s work package standard for naval aviation technical manuals
- MIL-STD-3031 — the Army’s business rules for S1000D
- ATA iSpec 2200 — information specification for commercial aviation maintenance
- ATA Spec 1000BR — Civil Aviation Business Rules for S1000D
- ATA Spec 2300 — digital data specification for flight operations exchange
- S2000M — materiel management and provisioning data, the source behind illustrated parts catalogs
- S3000L — Logistic Support Analysis, the upstream process whose data feeds publications and provisioning
- ASD-STE100 — Simplified Technical English, the controlled language for maintenance documentation
- DITA — the Darwin Information Typing Architecture for modular, reusable technical content
What this includes:
- Content architecture and data modeling
- Migration from legacy/unstructured documentation into structured, machine-readable formats
- Authoring and publishing pipeline design and implementation
- Automated composition and format conversion
- Content transformation and quality assurance
- Content Delivery Platforms
Compliance is the floor, not the finish. A 40051-compliant technical publication that validates against the DTD but fights the maintainer using it has met the letter of the contract and missed its point. We build content that passes government and OEM acceptance and works at the point of maintenance — and we say so in that order, because that is the order the work gets reviewed in.
Structured content is not a formatting exercise. It is the prerequisite for every machine-driven initiative an organization will pursue in the next decade: automation, intelligent search, generative answers, and cross-platform publishing. Content prepared for consumption by both humans and machines compounds in value. Content that isn't is a liability that gets more expensive to fix every year.
FAQ
Questions We Hear
What are technical publication services?
The work of producing and maintaining the documentation that regulated products require: authoring maintenance and operator content to a governing standard, converting legacy libraries into structured formats, building the publishing pipelines that turn one source into page-based, interactive, and portal outputs, and keeping all of it current through every revision cycle. In aerospace and defense the standard — S1000D, MIL-STD-40051, ATA iSpec 2200 — defines what compliant means, which is why the service is inseparable from fluency in the specification.
What does “40051-compliant” actually require?
Content authored to the structure MIL-STD-40051 defines — work packages, validated against the standard’s DTDs, delivered in the part and revision the contract cites (Part 1 for IETMs, Part 2 for page-based manuals). Tailoring is normal: most contracts invoke a subset, so the real requirement is the contract’s selective application, not the whole standard. We scope against the cited tailoring before estimating, because that decision sets the size of the deliverable.
Can you convert legacy manuals to S1000D or DITA?
Yes — legacy conversion is a large share of the practice: SGML and word-processor libraries into S1000D data modules, unstructured manuals into DITA, iSpec 2200 libraries prepared for S1000D coexistence. The bulk converts predictably; the cost lives in the exception structures, which is why we sample the library before quoting rather than after.
Do you work with OEM-supplied data?
Constantly. Operators and sustainment programs receive manufacturer content in mixed formats and levels of conformance, and the ingestion path — validating, normalizing, and merging OEM revisions into a controlled library — is where centralized documentation succeeds or fails. We build and run those paths.
Also from Shakewell
Other Services
Analysis & Strategy
Discovery, content audits, architecture assessments, and AI readiness planning before anyone builds or migrates anything.
Enterprise & Regulatory Publishing
Structured authoring, effective-dated delivery, and single-source publishing for rules bodies, standards organizations, regulators, and policy publishers.
Training
Hands-on courses in S1000D, MIL-STD-3001, MIL-STD-40051, and DITA that build real internal capability.
Full-Stack Software Development
Integrated digital platforms: system integrations, CMS, web and mobile applications, parts catalogs, and portals.
Applied AI
AI that answers from your approved content, not around it. We assess readiness, ground retrieval in structured sources, and automate where it actually pays. No platform pitch.
Ongoing Support & Operations
Maintenance, security monitoring, publishing pipeline support, and a defined escalation path after delivery.
Get In Touch
Let's Talk
Tell us what you're working with and we'll give you a clear-eyed assessment of where technical publications & content engineering fits.