How do you measure the production of documentation?
I'm a little tired of discussions about throughput, which is how much documentation work you can do. I understand the importance of this question to a business. Every couple of years, I hear the same stuff. Hours? Days? Topics? Pages? Words? Per day? Per hour? Now a new word is making the rounds: capacity. I think this is a misuse of a good term. Capacity is something of a maximum number not be exceeded. I think a more valuable concept is throughput because it puts the focus on efficiency and streamlining.
When I was a college student, I worked in an injection-molding (thermoplastics) factory. The machines were identified by capacity, meaning how many pounds of force were generated when the mold was closed. The capacity determined the size of the mold you could put in the machine. The size of the mold determined the number of parts per cycle. A bigger mold had more cavities in it for more widgets.
Each machine produced parts at a certain rate. For example, you might be able to produce 10 widgets per mold per cycle, where each cycle lasted 30 seconds. When you do the math, you come up with a measure of throughput.
Half ton machine
- 10 cavity mold * 2 cycles per minute = 20 widgets per minute throughput
- or 1,200 parts per hour
Now this is a very easy model to understand. You can introduce a lot of perturbations to the model. You can increase throughput by reducing cycle time. You can increase throughput by doubling the capacity, i.e. using a bigger machine. Using a 1-ton machine can hold a bigger mold with more widget cavities. This presents you with a set of variables and results that allow you to make decisions.
- Will the cost of a new and bigger mold be offset by the increase in throughput in a reasonable time?
- How many more rejected parts do we get if we reduce cycle time? How would that affect overall throughput?
This study is called operations management in business school among other places, and industrial engineers do the analysis.
Basic principles apply to this study, which I'm confident can be applied to the mechanics of building documentation. I don't think documentation throughput is so different that we can't hope to measure it, ever. On the other hand, producing documentation is not so simple either.
Measuring documentation throughput is more complicated than injection molding because the finished products are more variable than simple widgets. I'm not taking anything away from plastics engineering. That's hard stuff, too. It's all toluene this and diisocyanate that. Urethane foam catalysts run amok. Plastics engineers figured out that they make money when the engineers do the hard stuff on their end so that the production of parts is easy.
I would like to see the same rigor applied to understanding the documentation process. That way, we will have a better idea of how it will affect us internally when a perturbation happens, such as a staffing change or a change in authoring tools. While I can see other business uses such as justifying headcount, I think understanding throughput would lead to a better understanding of the internal processes of our team. We can control those more readily and see more tangible results.
