[austechwriter] Re: The overwork phenomenon
- From: "HALL Bill" <bill.hall@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 10:06:42 +1000 (EST)
Christine,
What will call a screaming halt to the time frame/quality contraction is wh=
en significant numbers of people start dying as a result of badly designed =
/ engineered / documented products. This will likely lead to legal actions,=
company failures and the imposition of stringent standards and regulations=
comparable to what is happening with accounting firms and regulations toda=
y.
However, electronic workflow and tracking systems in conjunction with produ=
ct data and content management system to provide project and engineering kn=
owledge management and controlled reuse will still allow us to produce more=
and better documentation in less time and help to enact and enforce the qu=
ality standards.
We certainly proved the value of this technology in the ANZAC Ship Project =
in 2000 when we moved from what was a very smart word processing and file m=
anagement environment to a full content management solution with electronic=
workflow.=20
By the time we completed migrating our documents into the content managemen=
t environment we had simultaneously achieved the following:
o author productivity probably more than doubled (difficult to quantify ex=
actly because we didn't have good productivity measurement tools in the bef=
ore situation),=20
o we achieved very major improvements in quality (measured by the essentia=
l elimination of a variety of different kinds of errors we couldn't prevent=
in the WP environment, increased standardisation, etc.), and
o we reduced document authoring and change cycles weeks or months to hours.
The story of the conversion was published in the May 2001 Technical Communi=
cation - http://www.tenix.com/PDFLibrary/91.pdf. Searching Google for Tenix=
and SGML will find several presentations and other background.=20
Regards,
Bill Hall
Documentation Systems Analyst
Head Office, Engineering
Tenix Defence
Nelson House Annex, Nelson Place
Williamstown, Vic. 3016
Australia
Tel: +61 3 9244 4820 (Direct)
URL: http://www.tenix.com
Mailto:bill.hall@xxxxxxxxx
-----Original Message-----
From: Christine Birtley-Kent [mailto:birtley_kent@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, 14 August 2003 8:37 AM
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [austechwriter] The overwork phenomenon
Interesting article - even more so if anyone posts some answers.
http://www.darwinmag.com/read/080103/inundated.html
One of the phenomena I have observed in over 15 years contracting is that
time frames are getting shorter and 'quality' is reducing. But do WE have
any choice? Philosophical question - this can't continue indefinitely - so
what stops it and when does it stop?
Regards, Christine
Ph: +61 7 4958 3107
Mobile: 0407 604010
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