Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People

Chapter 8. Optimizing Your Organization’s Efficiency and Effectiveness

	The New Six Sigma integrates best-practice processes with tools designed to help leaders in driving their business strategy for dramatic short-term business results while building sustained future capability.
	--Matt Barney and Tom McCarty, The New Six Sigma

Senior management, concerned about the expense of supporting first-class information development activities, asks information-development managers to measure the productivity of their organizations and make a business case for the value of their information products to the customers. In response, you may be tempted to throw together a list of things you can count: number of pages produced per year, number of pages produced per writer, number of customer complaints about documentation and number of complaints resolved, number of typographical errors found in documentation, and so on. The result is an awkward set of countable items, many of which have nothing to do with productivity and provide little evidence that customers find value in the information they access.

Developing a comprehensive program to optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of your organization requires a much more thoughtful approach, one that ensures that you are measuring only what you need to measure to ensure that you are meeting your goals. By following a process of goal setting, instituting ...