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> > > > It is now my duty to take
> > > > our four content writers, and improve their
> > > > efficiency by 20 percent.
This is a reengineering process. You need to change the way
the documentation is produced, not simply make everyone do
the same things 20% faster. By doing the later, you might
see an improvement for a while, but only for a while, and it
will be accompanied with a degradation somewhere else, like
increase of errors or reduced moral.
You cannot do this until you know how you do what you are
currently doing...not how you SHOULD be doing it, but how
you really are. Don't worry that some of the things you are
doing will appear inefficient...if there wasn't
inefficiency, you wouldn't be doing this in the first place.
1) Identify each task at its lowest level that you actually
perform. You may be surprised at the number of tasks you
come up with. A task is something along the lines of
"Incorporate an existing graphic into a page". Maybe after
you have this list, the first thing you'll notice is some
things that you are doing that either you shouldn't be doing
because it falls under the domain of another group, or that
you don't need to doing some them any more because they've
been outdated. There's a time savings right there.
2) Once you have this list of things you do, determine the
amount of time it takes to do each of them. It may be 10
minutes or an hour. If it takes more than an hour, you
probably haven't reduced it to it's lowest terms, see number
1 above. To the list of things you do, enter the time value.
3) Now that you have the time for each task, you can tell
what functions are taking the greatest amount of time. Those
are the tasks you'll consider modifying because they'll give
you the greatest bang for the buck.
3) You may find out that among the top 10 things you do are
things that don't contribute to actual document creation,
such as "Get draft approval", or "Fill out reproduction
department form", or "Get signoff". Yes, these are
necessary, but the difference between one of these and an
actual writing function is that they are man-made
constraints, and therefore, all it takes to change them is
for someone with the authority to simply change them. Maybe
you find out that from beginning to end, you must get a
total of 4 reviews. Eliminate of them and you've saved 25%
of the time right off the bat.
You are not going to get a lasting 20% increase in
efficiency by increasing RAM or simply working faster. It
has to be done at the foundation level.
John Posada
Senior Technical Writer
writer[at]tdandw.com
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