Re: Estimating a Project - A real lulu

[Yvonne DeGraw <yvonne -at- SILCOM -dot- COM>]

Tracey Moore <temoore -at- BELLSOUTH -dot- NET> wrote:
>By my own personal estimates, this can't be done in 8 days.
>What do you guys think?

If you take it, be sure to farm out the typing of the handwritten source to
some typists. With several of them, you could get that part done in a day
or two--leaving you 6 days or so to do the rest. Ha!

Still sounds like a ridiculous schedule. Maybe if you also farm out some
editing to other tech writer/editors. Basically, people are right about
"good/cheap/fast, pick any two". For this, if they want it really fast, I
think they will only get to pick one of "good/cheap/fast".

It's ~100 pages, so maybe it's a 25-day project. They want it in 8 days, so
they need to pay for 3-4 people on the project. And they still can't have
"good" because you won't have time to ask their SMEs questions or test the
results.

But, think about whether you want/need the work. It won't be anything you
can use in a portfolio. I recall a particular project I took when I started
contracting where they wanted it cheap and fast and didn't care about good.
That wasn't fun and I was glad it was over fast.

Yvonne DeGraw, Technical Services     o Technical Writing
yvonne -at- silcom -dot- com                     o Online Help
http://www.silcom.com/~yvonne         o Web Documentation
Tel: 805/683-5784                     o Database Publishing

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