Dr Amanda Patterson, Comtech Services
August 15, 2024

Have you found yourself shopping for new technology, tools, courses, or other resources, wishing you could get funding for it, and then realize you do not know how to ask for it? Or have you been asked ‘how much will it cost’ or ‘is it worth it’ and realize you have no idea how to justify the costs? You are not alone. Calculating the cost of content creation, ROI, or even accurately estimating the time required for projects has plagued many people in the technical communications industry.

One reason for this near universal difficulty is that, as we all know, the same size project can take vastly more or less time for a million reasons. Sometimes you can sit down and write 2000 words in 2 hours and sometimes you can write 40 words in 40 hours. Other times, the SME gets pulled off the project or their priorities shift, and your writing project comes to a grinding halt. If graphics are involved, sometimes they come together easily (the photoshoot goes smoothly and editing is effortless) other times, creating a simple infographic seems to take forever with no apparent cause. And there are always the issues with tools and technology: software crashes, files get corrupted, computers need updating, IT pushes a new security measure, etc.

How do you explain the squishy-ness of the content creation process to leadership (who are not likely to be content creators themselves) in a coherent 45 min presentation as part of a 60 min meeting? You start small and start counting things: hours, pages, topics, infographics, tickets, any of it. Then start comparing those things: hours between projects, topics between products.

Tracking time

The most foundational metric a technical communication professional or team can track is the time it takes to do each project. This means tracking all the people on your team by every project and doing so that you can quickly and easily pull reports. There are several free online time tracking and timesheet software applications.

These tools will allow you to create and share projects with your team to get a complete picture of the project. You will need to establish best practices about using the software, like does everyone round to the nearest 15 min or do you just let them stop the clock and round at the end. Personally, I preferred it when the team just stopped the clock, and the report would capture as close as possible the exact amount of time spent. I was hoping to avoid the unintentional inflation or deflation of hours spent on the project. Yes, when I pulled the reports, I got messy and unattractive numbers. But if I had to report them out, I just rounded them.  This meant that the time was rounded once (at the end) and not twice (once by the individual contributor and then again by me at the end).

You will have to decide how to organize your projects in the time tracker. I advise that you go with your gut and use your more colloquial nomenclature for this organization. But if you have a strong taxonomy and content hierarchy, you can lean into that. The main goal is to clearly define the projects and make finding the right time bucket easy to find. As part of this change management, it can be helpful to define each of the categories and make a shared document that states what bucket you want each type of work to be categorized as. For example, what is ‘miscellaneous meetings’, ‘administrative’, or ‘what bucket does the staff meeting get categorized as?’ These are some things you will need to be flexible about and willing to change as your team raises questions and concerns. You want to make it as easy as possible for the teams to use so they will start tracking the time.

As with any new tool, you want to make sure that you do some change management with your team. Be honest with them that you are testing this, and that you may choose another software. When I made this type of change, we used one time tracker for about a year and unanimously decided it was just too cumbersome, so we abandoned it and transitioned a second time.

Testing should be for some months and not some weeks. Ask the team to try the tool for that long in good faith. This will give your team time to get over the ‘new tool whiny’ stage of change management. During this time, flexible and willing to adapt your time-tracking solution to the team’s needs.

The other advantage to the time tracking software is that you can see the active and inactive time of a project. Knowing that a project not only took 40 hours, but it took three people 40 hours over the course of 4 work weeks gives you a robust understanding of what the project really took to complete. So, when someone asks, ‘how long?’ you have a realistic answer… 4 weeks, but 40 active hours. This will help you set realistic expectations with leadership.

Once you have several completed projects in your time tracking system, you can find the average time spent on your projects. With a count of the number of content pieces you created for the projects you can establish a baseline for how long it takes to create a piece of content. This is the critical part to estimating how long a project will take.

 

 

 

 

 

Cost

The second foundational metric is cost. If you do not have access to salary information for the team, you may have to partner with HR to get this information. However, if you know the salaries of the team, you can easily figure out how much an hour of time costs your organization if you divide it by 2000 hours (average working hours per year).

 

 

 

 

It is up to you if you include the full benefit package information. I have never been questioned about it by leadership when just using the salary numbers, although in hindsight, I should have included the bonus payouts in my calculations. Additionally, I recommend including the administration and professional development time that your team will incur because then, the content creation cost will pay for the non-billable hours spent. Depending how granular you have your team tracking time, you should be able to differentiate these times in reports from your tracking software if your leadership is asking for that level of specificity.

Creating Metrics

With basic time and cost information you can then calculate some of the other metrics that will help you speak the language of leadership such as: cost of content, efficiency gains, and decrease time to market.

 

 

 

 

Knowing your cost of content will also help you with tool evaluation because it is foundational information for return on investment (ROI) calculations. When you know the cost of your content and the time it takes for you to create new content then you can evaluate if you will get enough process gains from the new tool to justify the investment. Some tools vendors will have an ROI calculator that they use, and you can plug the numbers in and let the calculator do the work. Other times, you can take the productivity numbers that they promise and then apply that increase in productivity (decrease in time to complete projects) percentages to your time for projects. You can apply the proposed productivity gains to previously completed projects to demonstrate how much faster that project could have been completed if you had the tool.

 

 

 

Summary

The bottom line is that leadership does not want a story about how squishy the writing process is, they want hard numbers and metrics. Use the data to tell the narrative of why you need the purchase, how it is going to improve your production, and how you are going to demonstrate success in implementations. Knowing how long content takes to create and the associated dollar value of that content are the most basic form of metrics for data-driven decisions. By speaking the language of leadership, they understand what you are working on and why it is important and therefore be more willing to fund your request.

 

Happy Tracking!