Just like the North American explorers seeking the elusive Northwest Passage, we technical communicators have been looking for a certain statistic that, if we were to find it and measure it, we could prove without a doubt that our work was of high quality and that would demonstrate, without question, the value of a technical communicator's services to an employer. We devised many approaches to assessing quality and demonstrating value began in the 1970s and 1980s. This is called the industrial definition of quality because it is the same approach used to assess the quality of manufactured parts, like circuit boards. Since the early 1990s, we have generally concluded that no single, unquestionable measure quality and value. We reached that conclusion, in part, because we are increasingly distinguishing between the terms quality and value and recognize that they are not synonymous.
Quality is one of the criteria that people use to assess value.
That is, people perceive value as a relationship between price and quality. Value, then, addresses the financial dimension of quality. They concluded that the value of technical communication is partly demonstrated by the revenues generated or expenses avoided by the communication products we produce. For example, by redesigning a form, a technical communicator working for the U.S. Veterans Administration was able to increase responses and reduce errors, thus significantly reducing mailing and re-work costs. As our field matures, we are increasingly aware of the many characteristics that contribute to quality.