“The vibes were off”: Adapting Agile story points estimation to technical writing¶
Description
As writers and documentarians, being tasked with figuring out how to measure our productivity with tidy quantitative metrics can be an anxiety-inducing, onerous, or seemingly impossible task.
Time tracking is tedious and impractical when you're slicing your time among many simultaneous assignments, and it doesn't account for the difference in cognitive load between an hour spent editing existing content versus an hour researching or writing about a complex new topic. Tracking word counts is not only impractical but also counter-intuitive when your goal is to be concise, and it fails to capture the research, planning, review, and editing that also goes into the process.
Some technical writers might be tempted to redirect the attention of their higher-ups toward more qualitative accomplishments or markers of productivity. Others might tap their well-honed storytelling skills to try to convince leaders that many traditional productivity metrics won’t work for technical writing teams and that our experienced and informed – but ultimately subjective – assessments of our workload and capacity will have to suffice.
But what happens when you decide to tell a different story? What happens when you embrace quantitative metrics by borrowing a proven strategy from developers?
This is the story of how my team adapted the concept of Agile story points estimation to our technical writing work, including:
- How and why we moved away from “vibes-based” estimation of workload and capacity based on past experience and gut feelings toward a more systematic, consistent, and data-driven model for scoping our work.
- Our methodology for numerically scoring each task in a way that attempts to account for all aspects of the work and minimize subjectivity.
- How we’re collecting and analyzing story points data.
- What worked, what didn’t, what we’ve learned, and what we’re still figuring out.
- Conference: Write the Docs Portland
- Year: 2024
