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Subject:RE: What would *you* do... From:Mailing List <mlist -at- ca -dot- safenet-inc -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 6 Apr 2004 15:52:01 -0400
Peter Swisher [mailto:pswisher -at- arisglobal -dot- com] suggested:
> You probably have "done it" already. You probably have saved
> the company
> money. If so, document that in terms such as money saved,
> time saved (time =
> money), reduced support calls, increased brand recognition, whatever.
To have figures on money saved, you need a way to quantize
money spent before something that you did, versus after
something that you did, and the difference that you claim
must exclude changes that other people introduced during
the time period.
I, for instance, always produced PDFs of my documents, whether
they were to be printed or just go onto the CD. So, when the
company decided to reduce the number of docs that were actually
printed, it was some product manager's decision, and it was
communicated to our fulfillment people.
I improved the documentation over the years, but the product
also changed, so there's no real way to discover what percentage
(if any) of support calls were prevented by something that I
did, versus evolution in the product itself. Nobody ever
kept stats on that. Nobody is motivated to start asking
customers questions carefully tailored to extract that info
during support calls. Customers making support calls usually
have more important and urgent things on their minds.
Certainly, if I fixed something that was broken in the docs,
and calls on that topic stopped coming, that's an improvement
and a money-saver, but since I've been responsible for the
docs for the past 5-1/2 years, there's an obvious rejoinder...
I'm just fixing something that I missed previously, and stopping
a cash drain that I started. Not a great selling point.
The recent move from mostly PDF to mostly WebHelp for the doc
set was a thing of beauty, and a long, concentrated effort on
my part, but it was inspired/required when a bigger company
purchased us. Now that yet another company has purchased us,
it may actually turn out to have been the wrong thing to do
(no indication of that, mind you, just noting that the new
owners' priorities may very well differ from the previous).
This business of quantizing savings/profits due to documentation
is kinda nebulous from where I sit. I may, though, just be
looking at it from the wrong perspective. Too many trees --
can't see forest. :-)
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