Every month you'll get news and analysis of publications standards, trends, and practices. That's a question many publications specialists dread, but they've been hearing it a lot more often lately as managers hold them to tighter schedules than ever. Accurate time estimates are essential to projecting the costs of doing work, whether it's for external clients or other departments within an organization. In the olden days, it didn't seem to matter how many hours were spent editing, as long as all the errors were caught.
Publications are often a prime target for cost cuts.
Managers and editors alike can benefit from a system that makes it possible to estimate costs and set reasonable performance goals. But editors in particular often say that it's difficult for them to look at a stack of pages and come up with a time estimate. There are so many variables, they say, that even a ballpark estimate can be tricky to calculate. Everyone would agree that publications work is subject to many unknowns, but it's still possible to pin down key aspects of a project, apply educated guesswork, and calculate a relatively accurate time estimate. Here's a five-step method for arriving at that elusive number.