Re: Unskilled Tech Writing Managers

["John P. Brinegar" <johnbri -at- PRIMENET -dot- COM>]

Jonathan:

I have a hard time with the concept of the "value" of the services you ask
about. It 's the marketplace that sets the price of these services, and
their actual value may have little to do with the price.

Research might determine the value by comparing the cost of doing business
without these services with the lower cost of doing business with them. The
closest thing to such research that I know of was sponsored by the Society
for Technical Communication. The project director was Janice (Ginny)
Redish, PhD, and the title of the study was "Measuring the value added by
porofssional technical communicators." The results were published in STC's
journal "Technical Communication" (I've forgotten which issue), and a
longer version was available from STC's headquarters and may still be.

There are some $s data in the longer version, but they are not broken down
by the services you mention.

If you want an estimate of the price of such services, I can give you a
pretty good idea of what they are in the Pheonix area.

>Ok, now that I have your attention, I have to tell you that I am in shock.
>A few weeks ago I put out a request for information to this mailing list
>and cannot believe that I got 2 responses, none of which answered my
>survey request:

>If you are managing publishing services, I would appreciate a dollar figure
>(per hour) that you place on your perceived value for these services:
>* writing
>* editing
>* production
>* conversion between applications (e.g., Pagemaker, Word, Framemaker)
>* conversion between platforms (e.g., MAC-Windows)
>* translation
>* Other (please specify)

Yes, I was such a manager for several years before I retired.

-----------------------------------
John P. Brinegar, http://www.netzone.com/~jbrinega/
Consulting and development
-Performance support systems
-Technical communications

Phoenix, Arizona, U.S.A.
(602) 278-7398
johnbri -at- primenet -dot- com