RE: Managing A Project

[Sean Hower <hokumhome -at- freehomepage -dot- com>]

1) How much time does it takes for you to research and write up one page of reasonably polished-up information for a subject you are not familiar with?

YIKES. That's hard to say. It depends on the subject and how much ancilliary knowledge I have. At my current job, we're allotted about two weeks for research, this includes research about the program and about the subject for which the programm deals. For example, I had two weeks to learn an accident management system and also learn how police and other investigators manage accident investigations.



2) Do you polish up each page/section as much as possible before you move to the next page/section, or do a rough draft, knowing you'll fix it all up at the end of the project?

My "process" <hehe />
  1. Learn the subject/bug SMEs
  2. Get it on paper (all of it if possbile)
  3. Experiment/bug SMEs
  4. Refine
  5. Experiment/bug SMEs
  6. Refine
  7. Send for tech edit
  8. complete
or something similiar



4) How do you know when you're spending too much time working on a 
specific section of the project?

When you realize you don't have enough time to finish the rest of the project. I set daily goals for myself that work within my deadline. I work for towards those goals. Of course, my goals change and shift depending on many different factors.


5) How many hours do you normally spend, as an average, per week, 
researching, writing and editing?

It depends on the subject and how familiar/unfamiliar I am with things. I put in an 8-9 hour day, and get done whatever I need to get done keeping my deadline in mind. Some days I will write the entire day, some days I will research the entire day. When I started my current project way back, I spent a LOT of time researching because I knew nothing about anything that I had to write about, and it was stuff I have never been exposed to in any way...so I did a LOT of researching. now, though, I am so familiar with the topic and with the software, that I spend very little time researching and I can hammer out a doc pretty quickly and pretty much on command. It's cool. ;-)

I can say that I spend no where near as much time editing as I do in writing...but then again, this has been a very collaborative project, and so writing and editing have sort of become the same thing, if you know what I mean.

Hope that helps

********************************************
"And in the morning, I'm makin waffles." ~ Donkey
Sean Hower - tech writer
http://hokum.freehomepage.com

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