Re: Metrics (Re: How do hiring companies view TW resumes?)

[Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Your post just made me realize I can truthfully say on my resume that I saved a $55 million contract for a client. They were bidding on a government contract to build something. The contract required my client to have documentation on the CMS system they used to manage their documents (which sounds like an unnecessary redundancy if you say it fast). But they had customized the CMS over the years and had never documented those customizations. So they had to hire me to dig through it and retroactively create the requirements and use cases they should have done before they started hacking the CMS code. If I hadn't done those docs and if they hadn't been good enough, the client would have seen a chance at 55 million go down the drain.

Hey, I'm a wonder worker! Thanks for giving me the clue!  :-)


--- On Tue, 3/23/10, Paul Goble <pgcommunication -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:

> From: Paul Goble <pgcommunication -at- gmail -dot- com>
> Subject: Metrics (Re: How do hiring companies view TW resumes?)
> To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
> Date: Tuesday, March 23, 2010, 10:06 AM
> Another useful metric to track is
> "business enabled" by your documentation
> process.   For example, a recent employer
> made a $5 million deal which was
> contingent on getting a complex system up and running
> within a very tight
> deadline (for a customer with billions of dollars at
> stake).  If it had not
> been possible to create the documentation on time, using
> innovative
> processes, the deal would not have been possible. 
> Sure, the deal depended
> on many other factors, but I can honestly say that "my
> documentation process
> enabled $5 million in new business."  Or even, "my
> documentation enabled a
> customer to release a multi-billion-dollar product on time
> which resulted in
> a measurable uptick in the Dow Jones Industrial Average."
> 
> This isn't a comprehensive way to measure your value, but
> it can lead to
> impressive numbers to put on a resume or to share with an
> executive.
> 
> The best metric I've seen came about when the whole company
> embarked on a
> Single-Unit Marketing Model study to evaluate which factors
> drove customer
> decisions.  It was based on an elaborate survey which
> asked customers to
> allocate a theoretical budget between us and our
> competitors, then asked how
> that would change "if X were improved" or "if X declined,"
> where
> X=documentation, usability, ease of ordering, etc. 
> During the few years
> when the data was valid, it was easy to say, "If we make
> our documentation
> better, we will gain $Y in revenue; if we let it get worse,
> we will lose
> $Z."
> 
> -- 
> Paul Goble
> Omaha, Nebraska
> pgcommunication -at- gmail -dot- com
> www.pgcommunication.com
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