Re: performance measurements

["Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>]

Ideally, goals should be flowing from the top down.  That is, your company 
has
corporate-level goals, the organization to which yours reports has goals 
that
advance the corporate goals, your department has its own goals that advance
those, etc.  Otherwise, any goals you develop on your own will just be a 
case
of "we don't know what we want but we'll know it when we see it."

As far as the "phone calls to help desk" and "cost-effective documentation"
goals are concerned, be sure that reducing help desk calls is actually a
corporate goal, and if so, that you are specific about reducing help desk
calls for user issues whose solutions are findable in documentation, or else
you risk pitting yourself against your company's plan to charge for support
or having all your document improvements wiped out by some engineer who
writes the mother of all SW bugs or forgets to use dissimilar metals where
they need to be and finding yourself becoming more of a cost center because
calls went UP during the measurement period.

Our customers' primary concerns about our products are on-time delivery and
conformance to spec, so we all work to generic corporate goals for product
schedule and error counts (as well as others that are company-confidential
and can't be discussed), so my goals for my dept are designed to support 
those
and to prevent documentation from becoming a critical path in product 
delivery
or the source of user error.

Gene Kim-Eng



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lyndsey Amott" <amott -at- docsymmetry -dot- com>