Re: Striving To Increase The Page Count Was: Estimation of the number of pages...
Tony Markos wrote:
Purposefully high page counts happen often in TW projects. As I stated in a recent post, at a very well attended local STC "discussion" meeting on estimating, the almost universal consensus was that estimating is to be based upon page count. My (sole) attempt to challenge the sacred cow of estimating
based on page count was promptely cut off.
Project planning, which is what you seem to be describing, is a slightly
different concept, though, Tony. One can estimate how large a document needs
to be to cover the material -- one must, don't you think, do get a
project-level picture of things? This a different issue than a short-term
measurement of TW output, I think. This means that in different
circumstances, an estimate of output is different and depends on the
purposes for which the estimate is used.
Bonnie,
I think there is some validity to the notion that if you use page estimates in project planning this sometimes results in page inflation by writers.
This can result from writers' assumption that contributing more pages than the estimate projected is evidence of higher-than-normal productivity, hence a good thing.
There are two ways, it seems to me, to counteract this: one is to make clear to the writers that the purpose of estimating overall document size is emphatically not to set page count goals for writers but rather to get a handle on project scope and production costs; the other is to eliminate page count as an element in project planning, instead focusing on completeness of product coverage (not, "How many pages did you write today?" but, rather, "How many topics did you finish today?")
Dick
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