All

I’ve been given a challenge, and would greatly appreciate your advice, assistance, suggestions, and/or commiseration.

During a series of conversations with my boss (a remarkably rational, non-tech writer VP), he asked a number of questions, all of which boil down to the following.

“What’s the measure of a world-class Tech Pubs department?”

He went on to say that he felt we were doing a very credible job, especially in light of the expanding requirements/static resources with which we live, but impressions don’t count for much (especially in an engineering environment).

We work in a software company, as part of the engineering team. Along with Tech Pub and other things, he is also responsible for the QA function. He rattled off some QA-type statistics (code coverage, testing automation, trends in bugs found/fixed) as good examples of how a QA team in Company X might be compared to a QA team in Company Y.

I did not put the dreaded term “metrics” in the subject line – I’m not looking for way to track our progress against internal goals, nor our improvement (or otherwise) compared to our past performance. What I would like to be able to do is compare our performance against that of another, mythical, world-class software doc team.

I’m sure I’m not the first person that’s been so tasked, and wiggled out of tracking keystrokes per minute, typos per furlong, or doc bugs per release.

So – anyone have any ideas?

Thanks a million

John Rosberg