Re: Documentation Statistics Needed

["Lindsay Burrell" <lburrell -at- telus -dot- net>]

Eric asked about
>>a statistic regarding how long it
actually takes to create on page of technical documentation from scratch.<<

and

>>the time it takes to
create one topic of a help system<<

I'd like to hear what you all have to say about this, too.  The other part
of it (and harder, I think) is how to <justify> these numbers.  I'm a
contractor, and one of my bosses was recently sharing with me how, with a
change of management at her company, the standard "hours-per-page" numbers
she had been using for years in her budgets was suddenly challenged.
Essentially, how come it takes you that long to write a page? So then she
had to come up with whole new methods of justifying why it took how-long to
write the pages.

I presume it starts with keeping records, but with long projects, including
unstable software and feature changes in the products, new windows, blah
blah blah, I have a hard time trying to see just how these records would be
kept, and then how they would be analysed. Like, how exactly do you do this?
I admire you guys who have worked out this problem...