Cost estimate of a manual as if it was outsourced

[Gene Kim-Eng]

Depending on your circumstances it shouldn't necessarily
have been a surprise.  Outsourcing (including the use of
domestic contractors) can save time and/or money over
in-house if you have standardized, repetitive products,
fill-in-the-blank document templates and a relatively mature
process for handing off information from the developers
to the document producers.  But if you're in a relatively 
immature phase of either product or internal process
development and whoever is generating documents needs
to invent the document formats, hunt down developers
and track constantly-changing product congfigurations
all at the same time, outsourcing may actually add cost
and time because whoever is providing the outsourced
documents is going to have to do all the template 
standardization and process planning that you have not 
done before the grunt work can be handed off to the 
cheap labor.

Gene Kim-Eng

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Caroline Tabach" <caroline.tabach at gmail.com>
> We wanted to outsource a complete user guide and they were shocked
> that the outsourcer told them it would take 3 months to write, instead
> of the one month that it would take in house.