RE: advice for single-sourcing ( Framemaker + Webworks)

[HALL Bill <bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com>]

Hedley,

Congratulations, and thanks for giving us you "success factors".

To put on my sceptic's hat and remembering some of Andrew Plato's caustic
comments in the exchange he and I had on Techwhirl under the "Real Value"
topic about resource requirements and costs, can you give us some numbers by
which your success can be measured?

For example 

o Your support & development staff over author & production staff ratio
(i.e., a body count)?

o Productivity improvement ratios (e.g., before & after)?

o Predicted ROI for your costs vs benefits?

Warning: technology plug to follow...

I know these numbers may be sensitive, or (as was the case at Tenix) we
didn't have good numbers on the "before" situation.

However, in our case, where we implemented RMIT University's SIM system
(http://www.simdb.com/) with FrameMaker+SGML for ANZAC Ship maintenance
routines, within a few months of completing the implementation we had paid
for it several times over by eliminating a practically certain risk the
Client would not have accepted the routines because of too many
inconsistencies. Although we were not aware of the requirement when we
started the implementation project, we had to incorporate a range of new
Health & Safety warnings across 8,000+ ship-specific documents for the
routines to be acceptable - which was totally beyond the capacity of our
prior word processor based system to achieve. Any new staff we added to
handle the work load would have introduced enough new errors to crash our
automated delivery processing to ensure we still couldn't meet the deadline.
We were under notice from the client that they would refuse to accept
delivery of our 5th ship if the maintenance routines were unacceptable.
Contractually mandated liquidated damages for failing to meet the ship
delivery deadline was SEVERAL $A MILLIONS PER WEEK.

With SIM and FrameMaker, five of us put in a few extra hours, but made the
delivery on time. The Client is also now interested in taking a formal role
in our electronic document review and signoff workflow.

We are also now down to one author and one system administrator, both
working part time on the maintenance routines to maintain them for the
remaining five ship deliveries, along with a lot of other savings from easy
query and reporting access to the content for logistic analysis purposes.
Aside from the risk mitigation aspect (which was a bonus), we will probably
also achieve a respectable ROI on the implementation costs from labour
savings (although, as I said this would be hard to prove with real numbers
on the "before" costs).

Details of the Tenix project were published in my article published in the
May 2001 edition of Technical Communication. Electronic copy available on
request.

My next project at Tenix is to see if we can't begin to control content in
the formative stages of  defence projects (e.g., with bid and contract
precedents) against some international XML standards for exchanging
contractual information. Once a stable standard is achieved here, it becomes
feasible to build a complete organisational content (= knowledge) management
environment to provide for information flowdown and connectivity through the
entire project lifecycle. I am working to organise a demonstration project
in conjunction with the international LegalXML organisation (see
http://www.legalxml.org/contracts/) and some local organisations (e.g., RMIT
- http://www.mds.rmit.edu.au/, SpeedLegal - http://www.speedlegal/com, and
CSIRO Manufacturing Systems & Automation's Global Manufacturing group -
http://www.cmst.csiro.au/mansysauto/global_manu.htm). My goal is to
propagate structured authoring and content management through the whole
defence project lifecycle. I expect to be making an announcement in the next
few week re an establishment of a meeting to form a demonstration project
team to address Australian Defence contract standards. Anyone with specific
interests in this kind of standards based activity is welcome to monitor the
LegalXML site or contact me personally. 

Bill Hall
Documentation Systems Specialist
Data Quality
Quality Control and Commissioning
Tenix ANZAC Ship Project
Williamstown, Vic. 3016 AUSTRALIA
Email: bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com <mailto:bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com> 
URL: http://www.tenix.com/


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