RE: Techwriter Justification

["Kathleen" <keamac -at- cox -dot- net>]

Thanks for posting that, Bill. I think it's great information for those
of us who haven't had experience at managing and scoping projects. 

Kathleen

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Swallow
 
Oops, I left the complete text of the original post in my reply, so
Lyris will likely reject it. Let's see if this repost will go through.

I was the lone tech writer in a company of about 120 employees and one
of four tech writers in a company of about 75 employees.

There is no workable ratio. Rather, you take the number of scoped
hours for the work, divide it by the total number of work hours for
the project, and see what number results.

For example, say you scope out 1000 hours of work, and the work needs
to be done in three months. Three months is approximately 480 hours.
1000/480=~2

So in that case, you'd need two full time writers to finish the scoped
work on time.

If you can't get two writers, then you should be going back and seeing
if something can change. That is, if the number of writers is rigid at
1, the other two factors need to move somehow. Those other two factors
are ship date (time) and scope of work (quality).

This is the only model that truly works, from my experience.




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