You Need it WHEN?: Time-tracking and Estimating Documentation Projects, February 8, 2012

by programs on 05. Feb, 2012 in Past Events

Whether you’re managing a team of technical communicators or just yourself, it’s critical to accurately estimate the amount of time a project will take. This seems pretty obvious but the truth is, most technical communicators chronically underestimate the time needed and end up scrambling to finish at the last minute, or worse–miss deadlines. Last-minute scrambling is risky and frustrating and usually results in mistakes. Missed deadlines not only cost money but they make you look bad. Not to mention, if you’re a freelancer, you risk losing money if the project takes more time than you estimated. So how do you accurately estimate the time needed for a documentation project and how do you track the time you actually spend?

This session covers the essential parts of documentation estimating: determining the work to be done, estimating the time needed, tracking actual time and using the data for future projects. We’ll talk about top-down and bottom-up estimating and some best practices for both. We’ll also look at some “black holes”–things writers often fail to account for when estimating. Finally, we’ll review a few tools for estimating and time tracking that you can use to help manage your projects.

About Leigh

Leigh White is a technical communicator with 20-ish years of experience as a content creator and information architect. She is primarily interested in helping small technical publication groups leverage existing tools and improve processes to maximize content reuse, improve efficiency, increase offerings and save their sanity. Leigh advocates that effective technical communicators must be more than writers; they must also be part programmer, part designer and part project manager. She is a devotee of structured documentation and believes that DITA might just save the world. Her other professional interests include FrameMaker template/EDD design, DITA Open Toolkit customization and relational database design. She is currently authoring a book on customizing the DITA Open Toolkit for PDFs.