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On 01/13/2011 03:59 PM, Gosling, Anna C wrote:
> My manager wants to create an editing scorecard to grade the quality of my team's work. Some of the scorecard topics he's decided on are:
>
> * Adherence to editing standards
> * Editing comments demonstrating commitment to writer development
> * Editing comments demonstrating content understanding
> * Number of documents/pages reviewed per reporting period
>
> Does anyone's company currently use such a scorecard? I'd love your feedback about scorecard topics, how you or your manager uses a scorecard, etc.
I wonder how you'll judge the comments.
Sounds like an opportunity for mediocre editors to work the system
instead of getting the job done. There likely won't be any problem if
you hire only editors who simply want to turn out good work, and make
sure no one gets caught in the scorecard machine.
Except for the adherence to standards, this looks like a quest for
so-called objective measurement. You could create a piece of software to
conduct a poll of writers and SMEs to rate editors' comments on a scale
of 1-10, and devise a formula for weighting the ratings on the number of
documents or pages. The numerical results would look very, very
scientific. You could adopt a policy for ranking that would show which
editors were in the bottom ten percent, and then replace those editors
with others.
Later you would wonder why your outfit was no longer able to hire any
excellent editors like you used to have.
"ISO-9000 was all about this sort of stuff," says my wife, a quality
engineer. She says, "It doesn't work."
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