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Subject:Re: Online Help TW teams at MS From:Mary Deaton <m_deaton -at- KWARE -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 16 Jun 1999 07:36:53 -0700
David,
Office has maybe 5-10 writers per product (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint),
about half that many editors, at least one designer for each product, a
print production specialist, and an entire team who manages the database
used for writing, and so on. Writes do NOT do the Help coding. They just
write. Oh, and the indexers. For the first AnswerWizard the indexing team
was 5-8 people.
Last time I worked with the Office team was for Office 95 and I know user ed
had close to 100 people. It is doubtless larger now. Probably 60% or more of
the people are contractors.
A smaller product, like Greetings Workshop, might have 4-5 people on the
docs team with at least one editor, a graphics person, and maybe a technical
specialist.
In a very small product, like mouse, you might have two people writing, an
editor, a shared designer.
Only large products like Office would differentiate between print and online
writers. Most writers move around between mediums.
User analysis is done by people outside user ed--marketing and usability.
Program management also plays a role there. There is not usability on every
set of docs, so it would not be accurate to assign a headcount to that.
-----Original Message-----
From: David Goldfayl [mailto:davidgoldfayl -at- PMSC -dot- COM]
Techwhirlers,
Does anyone have an idea of the TW head-count (design, devel, authoring
implementation, front and back-end user analysis etc) used for MS's online
help
for Word or Excel?
I'd like to make a point about resources here and this will be very helpful.
Even numbers for other large and well known packages might be useful.
