TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
At 09:25 AM 12/2/98 +0200, Debi wrote:
>Counting the number of pages produced is a problematic measure since it
>doesn't address VALUE ADDED.
[snip]
>We are exploring the use of measures such as changes in
>problems reported in the customer support database, questionnaires and
>surveys.
While I agree that measuring by the pages written would be like measuring
programmers by how many lines of code they write (better code often is
shorter, and documented code is better though doesn't add to then number of
lines written, often), I don't know that your other measuring sticks will
work, either. If you measure it by the number of support calls, then you're
putting yourself at the mercy of stupid program design. If you had complete
(heck, even partial) control over what dialog boxes are called and look
like, as well as the text for error messages, then I might concede that
this would be possible. And, we all know how difficult it is to get
customers to respond to questionnaires/surveys. The ones most likely to
respond are those who want to complain about something (well, at least,
that's when *I* respond to surveys! :-).