RE: Striving To Increase The Page Count Was: Estimation of the number of pages...

["Bonnie Granat" <bgranat -at- granatedit -dot- com>]

Dick Margulis wrote:
> 
> I think there is some validity to the notion that if you use page 
> estimates in project planning this sometimes results in page inflation 
> by writers.
> 

Wherever I have worked, the writers were the ones who provided the page
count estimates for the features or concepts they were responsible for. It
seems to me that unless you have the writers get a handle on how many pages
they will need to cover the material, you cannot do an adequate job of
project planning. So, from the start, the page counts in project planning
need to be estimates based on the writers' real knowledge of the content (at
least at the point at which the project plan is made; they can't know for
SURE how many pages will be needed, but they can give a ballpark figure). I
can't see a writer who provides page estimates under these circumstances
inflating the page count just to meet the original figure, which was only an
estimate anyway.

> This can result from writers' assumption that contributing more pages 
> than the estimate projected is evidence of higher-than-normal 
> productivity, hence a good thing.
> 

Every documentation department should have general principles by which it
operates, such as economy of writing, and so forth. It seems to me that
these are bedrock issues that should be universally known in a department
(and handed down from on high), such as, "We say what we have to say
clearly, concisely, and economically, and we don't write a single word more
than it takes to completely explain the material."

> There are two ways, it seems to me, to counteract this: one is to make 
> clear to the writers that the purpose of estimating overall document 
> size is emphatically not to set page count goals for writers but 
> rather to get a handle on project scope and production costs; the 
> other is to eliminate page count as an element in project planning, 
> instead focusing on completeness of product coverage (not, "How many 
> pages did you write today?" but, rather, "How many topics did you 
> finish today?")
> 

Yes, I agree entirely. Wherever I have worked, page counts were always a
background issue that only came up if you were going to be way short of the
estimate and it would affect printing. That became less and less of an issue
with the advent of companies not printing anything at all.

I have never been where page counts had anything at all to do with any
judgment about a TW's quality of work or ability to meet job requirements or
excellence of performance.


Bonnie Granat / Cambridge, MA
   http://www.GranatEdit.com 



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