PUB$ Estimator: Spreadsheets for Documentation Managers News & Views Software Review

Chris Larsen Principal Consultant Management Process Integrators, Inc. (Scottsdale, Arizona) PUB$ Estimator is available for $195 plus postage, handling, and taxes from Comtech Services, Inc., 710 Kipling, Suite 400, Denver, Colorado 80215. Contact Comtech at (303) 232-7586. Originally published in News & Views January, 1996 issue. Copyright 1996 STC-Philadelphia Metro Chapter. For permission to reprint this article, contact the Managing Editor.

Managers in nearly every industry would like to think they their particular project management needs are unique and therefore unsuited to generic project management tools. Technical documentation project managers often feel this way, trying to navigate demanding projects through the rough seas of product instability, difficult engineers, unreasonable deadlines, and limited resources. To help tech comm managers keep projects ship-shape, former STC president JoAnn Hackos and her colleagues at Comtech Services have offered PUB$ Estimator, a suite of 18 integrated Microsoft Excel spreadsheets aimed at the specific needs of documentation managers. Available for Macintosh and Windows platforms since the early '90s, PUB$ Estimator takes aim at the trilemma of estimating, budgeting, and tracking projects. PUB$ Estimator and its accompanying manual help apply names and numbers to traditional documentation management issues: projecting the hours, weeks, and months required to complete a project; estimating labor costs and publication costs; keeping track of a project’s status; and getting the necessary information for making and justifying midstream course corrections. Grounded in experience The methodology behind PUB$ Estimator comes from a popular Comtech workshop and Hackos' book Managing Your Documentation Projects. The principles are deployed in a set of linked Excel spreadsheets and dialogs in which users plug in the basic numbers and names of their projects. The PUB$ Estimator formulas and macros in the spreadsheets extrapolate what the numbers mean over time. How does it work? You run PUB$ Estimator by loading a particular Excel worksheet file into Excel. The Estimator adds a "PUB$" menu to the Excel menu bar. This menu displays a set of four submenus for hours-per-page calculations, budgets, project tracking, and status reports. To set up a project, for example, you use the Budget submenu to record the project name, start and end dates, deliverables (always "books" in PUB$ Estimator), human resources, and per-hour costs for labor. Once you've entered the basic information, PUB$ Estimator fills in the blanks in its worksheets. For scheduling and estimating purposes, the Projected Hours and Projected Labor Costs worksheets perform the math on the numbers you entered to give you a realistic picture of what you’ll need for a project in terms of time, people, and money. It's aware of difficulties unique to estimating documents To help keep your hours-per-page rate accurate, an innovative Dependencies Calculator lets you modify your average hours per page according to critical variables that vary from project to project. The calculator assigns weights to factors that delay or advance project completion, such as information access, technical review, and product stability. By modifying the hours in the Project Hours worksheet until the hours-per-page rate matches the rate from the Calculator, you can produce a realistic estimate of the time required to complete a project. The worksheet puts the force of numbers behind your requests to upper management. PUB$ Estimator also calculates labor and other publication costs, mapping them into worksheets showing budgeted and actual costs across months. You can track progress on a monthly or weekly basis, measuring how much of the project is complete using milestones calculated backwards from the due date. You can change page counts, resources, and other values midstream, and the changes ripple through the rest of the worksheets to give you new estimates and measurements. Is it the only tool you need? Overall, PUB$ Estimator does an admirable job of giving you a big-picture view of your project’s cost and time requirements. Do not confuse it, however, with detailed project management, the province of more elaborate software such as Microsoft Project or Timeline. You’ll still need these packages if your resources engage in additional non-publication activities such as training, support, and testing. You might consider using PUB$ Estimator in tandem with one of these project management tools, getting the advance numbers from the former when the project is in its proposal stage, then migrating to the latter when the project takes off. Also, unlike the project management heavyweights, PUB$ Estimator cannot validate input into its worksheets. It cannot stop you, for example, from entering a completed-pages number that is larger than the number of projected pages, producing completion rates over 100%. Also, it is easy to overwrite important formulas and links to other worksheets. The more you know Excel, the easier it will be to avoid these errors and to extend PUB$ Estimator for your own needs.

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s Last updated: November 6, 1996 (wq)