How do you measure productivity?

This forum is for the discussion of the business and craft of writing help. For example writing style, choices of HTML Help or WinHelp or browser-based and so on...

Moderators: Alexander Halser, Tim Green

Post Reply
ivka
Posts: 57
Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2006 8:05 am
Location: Russia

How do you measure productivity?

Unread post by ivka »

The tough question I'm facing right now is this: "how to measure my own productivity?". The management decided that the tech writers' performance needs to be assessed somehow. However the basis for such assessment has still to be found. Please, share your thoughts and what you do. Here are some concerns that we have:

1. Counting words/characters of the newly created text and of the text that needs to be edited. These are not the same because the edited text may become much shorter after editing.
By the way, are there any known standards for the number of pages a technical writer "should" write, say, per day? The ones I've found differ so much...
2. Creating text labels for software, notes, warnings, interface elements, etc. Is it reasonable to measure this from the point of view of spent time, not the amount of text created?
3. Editing screenshots - I've got no idea what to do with this one :(
4. What else haven't I mentioned?
User avatar
Alexander Halser
EC-Software Support
Posts: 4098
Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2002 7:24 pm
Location: Salzburg, Austria
Contact:

Unread post by Alexander Halser »

4. What else haven't I mentioned?
Quality. Although I am more programmer than help author (Tim, the forum moderator, actually writes all the help files for our products), I have been in this business long enough to emphasize that quality is key. The best documentation is short and brief and ideally contains only what the reader wants to know, but not more. While this is certainly not possible, beeing brief is better than beeing long-winded and at the same time it's more work to extract the essentials.

When we talk about the documentation of new functions in Help & Manual, I'm always the one who wants it shorter, while Tim prefers it as detailed as possible. And I'm willing to pay extra for less. Measuring this productivity with word-counting would be counter-productive for us. But we are a small company with a flat hierarchy...

Would it be possible to show the management a chapter of the documentation of their own products in a "before" and "after" state? If they don't understand it before, but understand it after you edited it, well, that's productivity! (Just a bit of humor on a Friday evening, life is serious enough :lol: )
Alexander Halser
Senior Software Architect, EC Software GmbH
ivka
Posts: 57
Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2006 8:05 am
Location: Russia

Unread post by ivka »

That's exactly what came first to our minds after we heard the 'word-count' idea. After the editing is done, the chapter usually shrinks :-S Now calculate that! :roll:
User avatar
Tim Green
Site Admin
Posts: 23156
Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2002 9:11 am
Location: Bruehl, Germany
Contact:

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Ivka,

There's an old story about a New York times journalist who submitted an article that was twice as long as expected. His edtior asked him why he hadn't adhered to the required number of column-inches. His answer was, "Because I didn't have enough time to write a shorter article." Producing really short texts that contain everything the user needs is very difficult. User interface texts in software are an extreme example of this -- sometimes it can take much longer to come up with the right interface texts for a simple dialog than it would take to write the entire chapter describing the dialog's functions.

Another good example is advertising slogans -- sometimes an entire team can spend weeks on coming up with a single slogan that works. Try billing that on the basis of words... 8)

You can produce a lot of text quickly if you just start typing, but there's no guarantee that it will be really useful. Ultimately, the only way to bill technical writing work is on the basis of hours. Clients who understand the amount of labor that goes into producing short, useful and accurate texts will understand this. Clients who don't understand this will have a problem. Whether or not you are really being productive during those hours is another question, of course, and it's next to impossible to measure that. Sometimes your most productive time will be when you are getting up and making a cup of coffee because you're stuck...
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
Post Reply