Estimating eLearning projects--do you know what process you’ll follow?

from Joyce Lasecke, President

on December 30, 2009

Almost twenty years ago, I wrote an article for STC about estimating work effort for creating user guides and online help systems.  The article, “Stop Guesstimating, Start Estimating,” provided metrics for various types of content and tasks.  I still get occasional notes from technical writers who say they’ve used the metrics successfully for many years.
I’m also asked these questions:

• Are the metrics still valid?
• Do they apply to other types of content, such as website content or eLearning course content?

The answers to both question is “yes—as a starting point.”
The metrics represent hours of information gathering, writing, and revising that it takes to finish a countable unit, such as a page, a help topic, a glossary definition.  But the process used to create the finished units can significantly affect the work effort.  If you have a consistent process, then your metrics are likely to be very reliable.

However, if every project you do involves a different set of people and a different process, using historical metrics alone may lead to under-estimating the project.
As we’ve gathered metrics from projects in the past year, we have seen a variability of 50% in the work effort to create a page of content.  It wasn’t that one course had more interactivity, or that there was more content on an average page in one course versus the other.  It all came down to process for creating the content.  Two recent projects illustrate this variability.

For one project, about 80 percent of the content was known and agreed on at the beginning of the project.  The writer could use traditional methods of gathering information from subject matter experts and existing materials. She was then able to create a draft of the course content with the typical number of open issues that could be resolved during the review process.

For the second project, only about 10 percent of the content was known and agreed on when the writer began the project.  As a result, the process she used to create the content was vastly different from that of the first project. She facilitated sessions in which the subject matter experts discussed what the policies should be. She then wrote the policies and identified areas that the group hadn’t yet addressed.  When the subject matter experts saw the results of their work in writing, they re-thought some of the decisions they’d made.  The writer revised the draft accordingly. This continued for about three review cycles.

The difference in work effort?  A finished page in the first course took our typical metric of 2.5 hours a page.  A finished page in the second course took 5 hours to create.

A collaborative and iterative process, as followed in the second project, is becoming more prevalent as change and work speed up in corporate life.  The trick is to recognize before the project begins that such a process will--or could--occur so that you can estimate accordingly. 

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