Ben Hechter, principal of Objectives.ca (http://www.semitake.com) and coordinator of our chapter’s Consultants and Independent Contractors Special Interest Group, gave a very interesting, entertaining, and useful presentation on Tuesday, April 20. His “Simple Strategies for Meeting Documentation Schedules” not only covered planning, estimating, and prioritizing, but also included many practical tips for speeding up the documentation process, using innovative methods with the tools we are already familiar with such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Ben recommends keeping a project notebook, containing details such as what is agreed upon at the beginning of the project, renegotiations, and other factors that affect the timeline and deliverables. This is an important project management tool, whether you use a written notebook or some kind of online method for tracking key conversations. Keep track of who was involved in the conversation, the date, and what was said.

Ben rates schedules as probable, improbable, and impossible. Factors that influence the timeline include whether it is a new product or technology, whether the team is using new process methods, and whether the team is geographically dispersed. Any of these factors will increase the project development time. If there is turnover of key project members, this will also delay the project. To create the appropriate fiction, that is, a timeline that pleases the project manager, while still covering our butt, Ben recommends including confidence factors (such as I have 30% confidence of meeting this schedule) and variance factors (such as I have 80% confidence in meeting this date, with a variance of 50%). The variance would be a percentage of the total time on the project. Thus, an improbable timeline could be presented as “I will complete the documentation by Oct. 31. I have 30% confidence in this date, and there is a variance of 75% on the actual date!”

Ben recommends using concrete elements of the project to estimate our time, such as number of windows or fields we have to document. He also recommends rating the complexity of each item that needs to be documented (low, medium, and high). From there, create a prototype of an element for each level of complexity, to see how long they take to document. Then use these figures to create an estimate of the total time. Then double it! And if the factors mentioned in the previous paragraph are present for your project, triple or quadruple your estimate.

What if the estimate is too long? In order to prioritize documentation tasks, Ben told us about the Pareto principle, that 20% of the documentation will be used 80% of the time. This means if we can determine which 20% that is, we can focus our efforts on that portion of the product. A lot of people in the room were excited about this principle. I have certainly used it, without knowing what it was called, in my own projects! Another thing we can do is identify the risk caused by not documenting 100% of the product’s features, and leave it up to management to decide how to mitigate that risk.
The most brilliant part of Ben’s talk was his methods for speeding up the documentation process. Getting into the nuts and bolts of how we actually create documentation is something most presenters haven’t incorporated into their talks, so I really appreciated this aspect of Ben’s presentation.

Here are some examples:

• Use Excel to develop parallel content (and organize information by product identifiers such as screen names). For example, create all 1st level and 2nd level headings in a spreadsheet. Even create the paragraphs of introductory text under the headings. This ensures parallelism, and also helps us develop the framework for the documentation very quickly. Excel also has a concatenate feature that can be used to quickly create parallel pieces of text (adding the standard text to the variable such as feature name). Also try using Excel to create simple block diagrams.
• Use Word (rather than FrameMaker) for creating the initial structure of the document; this allows you to take advantage of the outlining feature, and drag and drop sections to rearrange them. Frame doesn’t have this capacity.
• Use PowerPoint to store and keep track of screenshots, with filenames in the captions. PowerPoint also can be used to create simple drawings very quickly.

Finally, to avoid painful delays, Ben recommends that we back up our data ourselves rather than depending on IT to do network backups. Never rely on a network backup! Keep an external disk.

Thanks very much to Ben for sharing his Schedule Shortcuts - Tools, Tips, and Tricks (download the presentation slides PDF (328 KB)). You can meet him in person to discuss these pointers at any Contractors and Independent Consultants meeting.