Staffing projects

[Robert Heath <robert -dot- heath -at- FRITZ -dot- COM>]

My company, a leading freight forwarder, is creating a system designed to
track shipments worldwide from its stations worldwide. The application being
written for this task is enormous. To give you some idea of its scale, I
estimate it to be about 2 or 3 times the size and complexity of Dreamweaver,
which is itself a very large and complex application.

The publications department here consists of three people: myself, a
production editor, and our supervisor. The task of writing the user manual
for the massive system has been thrust upon me alone. And I have been a tech
writer for four months.

While some training material doubling as a rough draft for a user guide does
exist, it's written and organized poorly and is out of date. To use it as a
basis for a true user guide, I'd have to correct it for all of the changes,
change its focus from training to use, and reorganize it.

MY QUESTIONS are these:
In your departments, what is the ratio of writers to projects in your
publications departments? What should I know before trying to persuade the
product manager to hire another writer?

I have heard that for Dreamweaver, the documentation task was divided among
a team of writers (each working for significantly higher salaries...). Isn't
that how projects are generally staffed? Or do other people find they are
working alone on monster projects?

Me feels the load a bit heavy here... :?(

Cheers,
Robert
*****************
Robert Heath
Technical Writer
Fritz Companies, Inc.
San Francisco, CA

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