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Subject:Ratio of writers to pages they maintain From:Paul Pehrson <paulpehrson -at- gmail -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Fri, 18 Feb 2005 11:17:48 -0700
I am curious to get some feedback from list members about the ratio of
writers to pages maintained per year in their organizations. (I
checked the archives, and only found info on writer to
developer/engineer ratios; I didn't find anything on ratios of writers
to pages maintained.)
In the company I work for, we have three writers, and we currently
have around 3500 pages of software documentation (mostly printed pages
with some on line help as well). Each product has yearly (at least)
releases/updates, so each year we end up going through all 3500 pages
to ensure that all the information is up-to-date with the current
release. I guess our ratio then is about 1:1150.
Since we continue to add new features to our product lines, we are
continually adding more pages to the documentation. Our work on
maintenance is obviously in addition to documenting new features. At
some point we will need to expand our writing staff to keep up. We are
just wondering how we compare with other writers in yearly maintenance
work load.
It's kind of like planting a lawn: if you keep making the lawn bigger,
you'll spend more time each week mowing.
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