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A few weeks ago, I posted a question about measuring productivity.
Thanks to all those who responded. Here's a brief summary:
-Measure the number of calls support gets for one version against the
number of calls support gets for a revision.
-Measure the number of calls support gets per year.
-A client ought to be interested in productivity;
customers ought to be interested in readability.
Neither metric tells the whole story; both are important.
-Measure cycle time per phase (writing, editing, consolidation, etc).
-Measure readability and word count.
-Measure revisions due to errors in the document.
-Tie productivity to user response to the manual and reduction of returns
and calls to support. Find out if the user likes the document.
I'm still working on this measurement. Based on the mail I received,
two things were very clear:
- We can measure what we do, but there is no accepted way to measure
when we do it better.
- Communicators (the creative types that we are) don't like being linked
to productivity.
Again, thanks for your support.
Charles Bottoms
Technical Communication
Allen-Bradley, Highland Heights, Ohio
