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Try to work out correlations between the documentation and trouble calls
from customers. For example, say you post a new, improved FAQ, and over the
following two months there is a decrease in the number of trouble tickets
opened by the help desk. Another way to look at it is to improve the
documentation used by the people who man the help desk phones, and see if
there is a reduction the number of escalations or the average call times.
Most help desks ask for people who contact them to fill in surveys - get
ahold of those and see if the satisfaction ratings have improved. If so,
try to work out if that can be correlated to changes in documentation. That
would be things like the improvements being time-liked to when doc updates
are done.
Ask the sales people if there are any customers indicating that quality or
availability of documentation has any affect on buying decisions.
That's for external documentation. Do you work with documentation that is
used by the developers? If so, you might want to coordinate with the QA
branch to see if you can establish any connections between documentation
and development process - drop in # of bug reports, development phase time
consumption, etc.
On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 3:38 PM, Jelus, Susan C. <
susan -dot- jelus -at- thermofisher -dot- com> wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> Technical Writing is part of the Research and Development department at my
> company. My manager, the Director, wants me to set up some ways to measure
> the effectiveness of the tech writing function. He says this will help us
> identify problem areas. Other functions, such as Engineering and
> Operations, measure things like turn-around time, on-time delivery, and
> number of backorders.
>
> I'm hard-pressed to find something easily measureable for tech writing.
> We produce mostly documents that are more than 100 pages, such as user
> manuals, and we usually do it over a 3-6 month time period. Of course, we
> have dependencies on Engineering and other SMEs, who all have major
> priorities in other areas.
>
> I've thought of measuring things like on time responses to requests for
> information or reviews, errors reported in publications, change requests
> received/implemented, product development changes requiring documentation
> rework... But it seems like it will be difficult to track and evaluate
> many of these items.
>
> Do any of you out there use metrics? If so, what are you measuring and
> how is it working?
>
> Thanks for your help.
>
> Susan Jelus
> Thermo Fisher Scientific
> Logan, Utah
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