Productivity Metrics: MS Word vs Structured Authoring

Subject: Productivity Metrics: MS Word vs Structured Authoring
From: HALL Bill <hallb -at- TENIX -dot- COM>
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 12:06:00 +1000

People,

I know the Word vs FrameMaker/Adept Editor or other DTP/structured authoring

environments is an old and hoary topic - I have just spent 2+days sifting
through
this and other documentation related forums seeking specific quantitative
comparisons on author productivity in the two environments from tech
writers/
companies who have used both Word and structured authoring products on
comparable projects.

The only quantitative answer I found on any of the sites was on techwr-l
from
Candace Bamber on Re: Cost effectiveness of switching tools - 5 June 1997.

Basically, what I am after is

1. a percentage change in productivity, based on actual experience, that
can be
expected from moving from word to the other tool,

2. which versions of which tools were compared,

3. whether the non-word tool used structural controls (e.g., SGML, FM's
EDDs)
in addition to templates,

4. how long it took to achieve the stated changes,

5. how you measured/estimated the productivity change,

6. what features/problems had the most impact to account for the changed
productivity,

7. a brief blurb about the authoring/publishing environment in which the
comparison
was made (type of documents, number and skills of staff involved),

8. whether or not your name/affiliation may be attributed in the
tabulation.

To keep the repetitious verbiage on the forum relating to this subject to a
minimum,
please respond to me off-line via email, and I will digest the findings to
the forum
in one hit. I believe any quantitative information that can be collected
will help
others who face the same problems I do in trying to build/knock down a
specific
business case for Word vs a structured environment.

By way of some background, the company I work (Tenix) for is in the defence
(sea/land/air) project management area. We have something on the order of
600 MS Word users (none with any real training, working on Word 6 and 97
using
Windows 3.1, 97 and NT platforms). Perhaps 200 (engineers, project
managers,
administrators, etc.) work on large/long lived corporate documents (e.g.,
design
studies, tender responses, head contracts, sub-contracts, product support
documents, training-technical- and maintenance manuals, etc.). Our
Integrated
Logistics Support Documentation group (currently 3 professional tech writers
and
5 engineering graduates) uses FM+SGML 5.5.2 almost exclusively, and we need
no convincing that Word is inappropriate for the kind of work we do.

Yes, I know one can do some really smart things with Word in a tightly
controlled
Office environment - where the system can be managed by someone who truly
understands how Word works (from one release to the next) and has access to
substantial VBA skills. Unfortunately none of this applies to Tenix.

I am the ILS group's 'documentation systems specialist', and am currently
running
an R&D project to build a business case to implement a corporate level SGML
content management system. One of the legs of the case is to do a
cost/benefit
projection on migrating our large/long lived document authors from Word into
an
SGML-based structured authoring environment. Unfortunately, our IS
department
and the people who sign checks for projects like this are so far removed
from the
documentation work face that feature comparisons and anecdotes that mean
something to readers of this forum simply don't compute - hence my need for
specific metrics from a number of different organisations that I can
condense into
a simple productivity multiplier that means something in dollar value terms
even
to executives whose idea of writing is based on dictation and paper
documents.

Regards,

Bill Hall
SGML R&D Manager
Integrated Logistic Support
Tenix Defence Systems Pty Ltd
Williamstown, Vic. 3016
Australia
Email: hallb -at- tenix -dot- com

From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=




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