On-line help facilities vs hard copy?

Subject: On-line help facilities vs hard copy?
From: "Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 10:35:48 -0500


Rachael Leyba wonders: <<I'm writing a final paper for school and I need
some statistics that emphasize the cost savings (soft or hard dollar) of
investing in a good help facility for customized software. As you probably
know, for the really complex systems, on-line help can take up a big chunk
of the development budget and it's usually the first thing to get nixed.>>

As you might imagine, this kind of information is usually considered
confidential by companies because it's just one more detail they're worried
their competitors will find out and use against them; nobody wants
competitors to know their operating costs. That notwithstanding, the
February 1995 issue of STC's _Technical Communication_ has a special issue
devoted to measuring "value added" by technical communication, and should
provide a good starting point for your search. I'm not aware of any more
recent studies of this topic, though a good librarian should be able to help
you search them out in the online indexes. If you find some good ones, let
us know!

You could also ask your librarian to order one of my STC articles through
inter-library loan: Hart, G.J. 2001. Prove your worth. Intercom July/August
2001:16-19.

You could also do some "back of the envelope" calculations yourself: For
example, use the standard manuals on your desk to find out a typical manual
length. Use that to figure out the printing costs for a manual; call any of
the commercial printers in your local Yellow Pages and ask them what it
would cost to print 10 thousand copies of a manual that size (ballpark
figures). You can now estimate a cost per page for printing, and thus, a
cost saved for each page moved into online help instead of printed. That's
not a particularly rigorous approach, so you'll need to be a bit more
careful in your logic, but this at least gives you an idea of where you
could go. My article provides a few additional suggestions.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada

"Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the
earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do
so. The first is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second is pleasant and highly
paid."--Bertrand Russell


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Help Authoring Seminar 2003, coming soon to a city near you! Attend this
educational and affordable one-day seminar covering existing and emerging
trends in Help authoring technology. See http://www.ehelp.com/techwr-l2.

A new book on Single Sourcing has been released by William Andrew
Publishing: _Single Sourcing: Building Modular Documentation_
is now available at: http://www.williamandrew.com/titles/1491.html.

---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as:
archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit
http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.



Previous by Author: RE: Single-Sourcing Online and Printed Documentation
Next by Author: Table split vertically across pages in Word?
Previous by Thread: Antwort: Deadlines
Next by Thread: Re: Questions about your autonumbering scheme


What this post helpful? Share it with friends and colleagues:


Sponsored Ads