Re: Tracking document complexity
Hi folks-
I work with a fairly large group of technical writers. All of our writers need to report their number of "completes" to the management, and at the moment that figure is all that the managers see. Some writers produce loads of documents with minimal effort, and others produce a smaller number with large effort. Some people end up with 50 completes a quarter, and others might have less than 10. It isn't a very useful metric.
We've tried to document complexity level, but that is too vague. One person's complexity rating is not the same as how someone else would rate the same document.
How do other people track these things? Our writers are spread out all over the place, and the management doesn't necessarily sit in the same building (or state for that matter), so they need some good way to understand how things are going.
Rick,
This is backwards. Writers should be working to complete deliverables that are accounted for in a project plan. Each deliverable should be associated with the anticipated amount of effort needed to complete it (person-days, basically). These numbers should be based on experience with similar deliverables completed during previous projects.
For example, if one of the deliverables is a design specification for a new chip, then the project template should incorporate an estimate for how long it takes to write a design spec based on previous projects for chips of the same complexity. (Certainly, Intel has a metric for chip complexity, even if they don't have one for doc complexity!)
Then the question is how well did the writer do in terms of producing the deliverable in the expected time, and the metric at the end of the year is the ratio between estimated effort and actual effort.
This serves two purposes. For a given type of document, if one writer is at 125% (estimated time exceed actual time) and another is at 75% (actual exceeds estimate), then one writer needs to be rewarded and the other needs to be counseled or reassigned. If all writers handling that type of document are consistently above 100% or consistently below 100%, then the estimate in the template needs to be adjusted to be more realistic.
If Intel had bought our software instead of going with one of our competitors, they'd understand that.
Dick
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References:
Tracking document complexity: From: Rettinhouse, Richardx F
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