-No Subject-

[Chet Ensign <Chet_Ensign%LDS -at- NOTES -dot- WORLDCOM -dot- COM>]

Howdy all,

Just curious if any of you know of any formal studies that have been done on
task breakdowns in professional writing activities.

I was reminded of this by an email message that I sent off to someone the other
day. About three years ago, I did an informal study of some of the medium-sized
writing projects going on in my company. We already had a time tracking system
in place that measured hours spent on individual projects. For the study, we
devised a set of extensions to the project codes that further subdivided time
into 3 categories:

- actual content-producing work -- writing, editing, creating examples,
capturing screen shots, indexing, etc.
- work that prepared the writer do be able to create content -- meetings w/
product team members, time spent learning the product, etc.
- production-oriented work -- formatting, reformatting material from other
sources, printing out review drafts, etc.

The allocation by the end of the project was 20% of the hours were spent
creating content, 20% was spend on prep, and the remaining 60% on production
tasks.

I've since talked to other technical writers who agreed with that breakdown.
But I don't know if any formal studies on this have ever been done. If anyone
else knows of any, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

Best regards,

/chet

Chet Ensign
Logical Design Solutions
465 South Street                            http://www.lds.com
Morristown, NJ  07960                  censign -at- lds -dot- com [email]
201-971-0100 [Phone]                  201-971-0103 [FAX]

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