Metrics for content development

First off, notice how I used "content development" rather than "writing content"? The reason is that writing is really just a portion of the task, and it's important to stand your ground on that. Otherwise, non-writers will scoff at your metrics. "An hour for a definition? Ha! I could write one in a minute!"

As for metrics...I'm taking a class at Microsoft on managing content projects. This week, we looked at the project triangle.

Fairly straightforward: scope, time, and available resources (and other costs) are the key components in planning your project.

For example, you may be given a project of three whitepapers, due in six weeks, with one fulltime writer and budget for 10 hours of editing. Doable? Well, to say whether it is or isn't, you'd need some sort of metric to back you up. "The average whitepaper is 5000 words and a single copy edit pass takes 1 hour per 1000 words." (I hope you can tell I'm making these numbers up...) "Estimating 15,000 words, I need at least 15 hours of editing."

Those are the sorts of metrics we were discussing in class. The difficulty is in getting solid metrics for content development. I really couldn't tell you how long it takes me to write a chapter of an operations guide.

And even with a number, whether it's hours or days or weeks, I don't mean a consecutive unit. Let's say that it takes 8 hours to write a topic. That doesn't mean 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with a lunch break = a topic. It's more like an hour today, in which I dump the information at hand and identify my key questions, which I email off to the technical expert. Next day, I get a reply and can put in several more hours. Now I send the whole topic off to the expert to review. (We should be counting the expert's hours as well.) The expert reviews, identifies the errors and gaps, makes comments, and sends it back. This may be several days later. I spend a few more hours fixing and polishing. Then the editor gets a turn.

A project model generally results in neatly segmented phases, such as in the next image. My method of working tends to look more like the image after...