CIDM Webinar: “DITA Metrics in Production: How, When, Where and Why (and How Much?)”

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DITA Metrics in Production
DITA Metrics in Production
I am presenting an updated version of the presentation I gave at the Baltimore DITA Conference for the Center for Information-Development Management folks tomorrow. It is called “DITA Metrics in Production: How, When, Where and Why (and How Much?)” and focuses on how to gather DITA-based metrics and use them to focus on quality and costs.

Here’s the synopsis from the CIDM site:

Using metrics for DITA is a common topic when it comes to figuring out the Return on Investment numbers to justify buying a Content Management System, but what about when you already have the CMS and want to measure how productive your writing team is? AMD’s Documentation & Localization Manager, Keith Schengili-Roberts has been using a DITA CMS for four years and will go over the types of metrics he uses to measure the productivity of his team. He will also look at how to measure re-use rates, the relative benefits of using segmentation numbers vs. topic counts, and looking at how to improve quality through metrics. This talk is aimed particularly at managers who are seeking additional tools for making effective decisions in deploying their DITA writing staff.

It runs tomorrow (June 16, 2011) and starts at 11:00am EDT (GMT -4:00) and is set to run for one-and-a-half hours (60 minutes for the presentation, and a half-hour for QA time). It is free for CIDM members, and costs $75 for everyone else. You can sign up for it here.

About

"DITAWriter" is Keith Schengili-Roberts. I work for AMD as a Senior Manager for Technical Documentation, and have recently helped usher in a new company-wide DITA-based CCMS. And I like to write about DITA and the technical writing community. To get ahold of me you can email me at: keith@ditawriter.com.

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3 thoughts on “CIDM Webinar: “DITA Metrics in Production: How, When, Where and Why (and How Much?)””

  1. I enjoyed your presentation, Keith. There was a slide in the presentation with a number of resource links and I cannot find it in the recording. Would you be willing to share those links?

    1. For the benefit of everybody else, here’s the info:

      Pre-DITA, good general overviews:
      Documentation Metrics: What Do You Really Want to Measure, by Donald S. Le Vie Jr. http://www.stc.org/intercom/PDFs/2000/200012_06-09.pdf
      Practical and Effective Metrics, by Geoffrey J.S. Hart http://www.stc.org/PDF_Files/myjob/geofferyHart.pdf
      DITA –specific:
      What is the Best Metric to Measure the Success of Your Reuse of DITA Topics? by Bill Hackos http://www.infomanagementcenter.com/enewsletter/200806/third.htm
      DITA Metrics: Cost Metrics, by Mark A. Lewis http://dita.xml.org/resource/dita-metrics-cost-metrics (look for PDF link)
      The Illusive, Writing Productivity Metric: Making Unit Cost a Competitive Advantage, by Mike Eleder (“Best Practices”, Feb 2011) [When I did a search for title in in Google I was able to track it down in a supposed members-only section of the CIDM web site.

      Hmm, I should probably turn this into another blog post. 😉

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