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I don't know of a way to quantify complexity. Even if you could pin a
number on it--on a scale of 1 to 10, this is X in complexity--it's is a
completely subjective thing.
Who determines the complexity? And are we talking about the complexity
of the document, or the complexity of the subject matter (nicely
distilled into a simple, clear document)?
On some level I understand why companies want to focus on
metrics--otherwise, personnel decisions and project planning just rise
up chaotically from a formless mass of hunches, opinions, and biases.
But how do we quantify what we do?
* Hours per document? Document lengths vary so much that this metric is
meaningless.
* Documents completed? Ditto.
* Hours per page? Then writers who can quickly spew out pages of
wordiness will look better than writers who take the same amount of time
to craft something more concise.
* Number of words? That would reward verbosity. I did some editing
recently where I took some material and reduced the word count by half,
and the resulting document was clearer and easier to read--but by this
metric it would be *less* valuable.
* Number of pages? That would reward verbosity, enormous margins, and
14-point Times New Roman. (I'm all for white space, but...)
I agree with Jan--if you can find a way to measure customer
satisfaction, that would be much more meaningful. (Or, perhaps, customer
reliance on phone support.) Getting users to provide feedback on the
documentation seems to be next to impossible, though. They only hit the
docs when they're trying to solve a problem and get their work done, so
they don't want to sit down and fill out a survey.
"Deadlines met" and "pages produced" metrics just don't mean much if the
documentation isn't meeting the customers' needs. The whole mess makes
me glad I'm a writer, not a manager--I can focus on documentation
quality and let other people try to pin numbers on it.
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