Re: How to Estimate Project Time?

[John Gough <john -at- ATRIUM -dot- COM>]

I've always used 2pp/day as a baseline for newly-written material (4
ppd for substantive revisions, up to 10 ppd for light editing).
Actual productivity depends on the material and your aptitude
and experience. You sound new if you've never been asked to
estimate a project before.  If so, stick to 2ppd as an
estimate.  Do try to improve on it. If your styles are in order
and you have a firm plan for fairly rote material, you should
be able to beat that.

Caveat: the figures I'm citing are usually applied to entire project
cycles, usually over 200 pp in length, and include reviews and
editing.  In small companies with low review/editing overhead,
productivity is higher.

BTW, productivity figures are *averages*. The minimum time to average
is one whole project.  Never allow anyone (including yourself ;) ) to
put an actual daily quota on you. It's absurd and unprofessional.
I've spent 2 days producing one page, then spent the next day
producing 20.  The first two days included a lot of thinking to solve
a presentation problem; the third was implementation of the
solution. If the documentation is for new software, you can burn a lot
of time interviewing and crashing the software.

Best bet is to assert a general avg time and tell them that you will
have to make adjustments after a unit or two.

FrameMaker is a great tool.  I've been much faster (50-100-200%) using
it rather than other tools (WordPerfect, Word), but it took a
few months to get really good at it.

John
----------------------------------------------------------------
John Gough    Atrium Technologies   Austin TX    john -at- atrium -dot- com