Productivity

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gail
Posts: 26
Joined: Thu Jul 05, 2007 2:33 pm
Location: England

Productivity

Unread post by gail »

Hello,

I just have a general, slightly obscure question to ask! I was wondering how long, on average, a project to rework 5 training manuals varying from 30-60 pages each might take somebody, where the work involved reformatting, proof reading and updating the documents to reflect a new interface? I know that it would be impossible to say for sure without looking at something, but I'm not sure how productive I'm being and it'd be great to have an idea of how long other people spend doing things like this.

Thanks.
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Jim Huskey
Posts: 54
Joined: Tue Jan 17, 2006 4:09 pm
Location: Universal City TX
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Unread post by Jim Huskey »

Gail,

You're right, it's impossible to say, but I recently did something that sounds similar and I can share how I did it.

If someone's pushing you for an estimate, tell them you need at least a day to come up with one. Find a standard work task, like completing 3 representative pages, start to finish, that should take you less than a day. Do it and measure your time spent, then multiply that time by how many groups of 3 pages are left to do. Throw in 10-15% for underfactoring complexity, then you've got a starting figure.

Revise at intervals. After doing 9 pages, see if the modeled forecast for time is still valid. If not, revise it. At least you've then got a more accurate forecast, but you've only spent one to three days to get it.

I try to always do this: underpromise and overdeliver.

Here's the example which might be similar to yours:
- I recently converted three training curriculum manuals, about 180 pages each in PDF, from version 4 to a version 5 to accomodate a new interface and a couple of new features for the program being taught.
- How to group/measure? I found that I had three main types of topics to fix which were grouped into 15 "modules". A module was this: an introduction familiarization topic with exercises for students (3-4 pages), then an assignment topic with more focused, real-world applied exercises for students (2-3 pages), then topics which held the 6-8 sample "completed documents" as exhibits to produce per module.
- I didn't need to come up with an estimate at first, but due to competing priorities, I knew I'd need to do it soon. I measured how long it took to do 1/15th of the work, "completing a module".
- It took me about 8 hours per module to get the work done to my satisfaction (and my quality assurance department's satisfaction). After the first day, I could forecast how long the whole project would take.
- The work included performing each training exercise, adjusting whatever needed adjustment, then going back and ensuring grouping of tasks was logical, then going back and ensuring I was exposing the students to each important function. I also needed to rewrite a lot of what was there, because it was written in passive voice.

At the end, it ended up taking about 115 hours to complete the whole project for the first manual. Since we serve three states, I was able to apply a learning curve to the process and do the remaining two states in about 1/2 the time, adding them to the same project with include and exclude options and sharing the basic procedure steps between state versions. Future maintenance will be very easy.

I hope this helps. Good Luck!
Jim.
gail
Posts: 26
Joined: Thu Jul 05, 2007 2:33 pm
Location: England

Unread post by gail »

Yes that does help thanks very much. I'm still quite new to this and I don't have the experience to estimate how long work will take, so it was great to read about your project! Cheers.
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