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Musing on Metrics column |
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You say you produce high-quality information products? “Great,” says your boss – “prove it.” Now what do you do? To frame the discussion, it’s best to start with Philip Crosby’s eminently practical definition of quality as conformance to requirements. Requirements come from three sources: (in order of importance) our users, our clients, and ourselves. You first need to determine the requirements of these constituencies. Requirements overlap, so your best bet is to concentrate on the “sweet spot” of attributes everyone agrees on, for example, timeliness and accuracy. If you determine requirements, then provide hard data on your products' conformance to those requirements, and then you have proven the quality of your work. Fortunately, there is broad agreement on what attributes satisfy users. As I discussed in my previous column, the STC Publications Competition examines 48 different attributes. Developing Quality Technical Information: A Handbook for Writers and Editors, by Hargis, Hernandez, et al, has another list, in good agreement with the STC attributes. I doubt that any audience needs things not on these lists. The quality requirements of our clients are simple: they want “good stuff, cheap.” Benchmarking (competitive analysis), the systematic comparison of your processes to those of the leader in your field, is an absolute demonstration of process quality. Short of that, if you follow the best practice of planning, review, and approval, and track compliance with your process, then you are very likely turning out work that’s both timely and accurate. (The difference between reviewed and unreviewed documentation is so clear you can almost say the proof is obvious by inspection.) Personal quality is what satisfies us as professionals. We all take pride in a well-written sentence and a tight explanation. But our styles vary, and who needs style police? Actually, your group’s self-image determines if quality improvement can even take root. If you all think of yourselves as artists, creating individual and unique works, then the quality of one work is unrelated to the quality of another, and there’s no point in pursuing the matter, because you’re each doing your own thing. If you think of yourselves as artisans, turning out a series of documents to the best of your ability, then you can speak of quality improvement over time, but only on an individual basis. Only when you think of yourselves as an information-product factory, producing work of consistent quality in volume and over time, can you talk meaningfully about quality improvement. (If you need to shift your group’s paradigm, start with this: “That’s a great piece of work! What can I do to make mine as good?”) The more powerful the metric you use, the more persuasive your argument. A metric that combines independent factors is a composite, and composite metrics are powerful. For example, the Flesch readability index combines both syllable counts and sentence lengths. It’s a small and frankly controversial measure of readability, but it’s powerful, and there are textbook publishers that rely on it. Of course, a better metric would be how long it takes a typical reader to read and understand passages of your text, which would synthesize the elements of readability, format, and clarity. It’s important to make a sound decision on what to measure. Easily measured attributes may not be important, and important attributes may not be easily measured. But once you’ve decided, combining even a few independent attributes quickly hones in on important aspects of quality. In fact, I suspect that only two or three independent metrics suffice to capture any given quality attribute. |
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Next time: |
The most important thing. |
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About the Author: Steven Jong, a Senior Member of the STC Boston Chapter, is a technical writer and writing manager. |