Project Scheduling Software

[Charles Fisher/Datatel <Charles_Fisher -at- DATATEL -dot- COM>]

Here at Datatel, we use a product called Project Workbench
(from Applied Business Technology, Inc.) company-wide. It's
great for things like scheduling projects, tracking milestones,
and resource leveling. But, as others have said, it works
well only if you feed it good data.

We also use the estimating factors from PUB$Estimator
(from COMTECH). We have historical data on the amount of
time it takes to produce a particular type of manual (broken
down a bunch of different ways: per screen, per procedure
topic, per page, etc.). We develop an estimate based on what
we know, then use the factors to fine tune it.

What that number gives us, however, is a total amount of time
for the whole project. We break out the total number of hours
into milestones, like so:

 50% of the time is spent writing the first draft
 0% is spent on review (you're not doing it; someone else is)
 35% is spent writing the second draft
 0% is spent with the second round review of updated material
 15% is spent doing the final writing and production.

Once we have the time estimates and milestones, we feed them
into Project Workbench with all of our other estimates for other
books. We also can specify things like dependencies, critical
paths, and priorities. We let the tool figure out our schedules.
--
Why doesn't DOS ever say, "Excellent filename or command?"

Charles Fisher
Senior Documentation Specialist
Datatel, Inc.
charles -at- datatel -dot- com