It better to estimate the worst case, rather than best case scenario. You could find that your conversion/merge goes much faster, in which case you are a hero. If you estimate too little and miss your delivery date, you are a villain.
If they go to Word, then there won't be any sharing of content. You will need to have two separate documents. Word doesn't play nicely with a complex or complicated format structure. And it isn't suited to conditional text, or referenced text. Scott Avraham Makeler wrote: >> > I will jump in and mention that to avoid a deadline being missed, > > Good point of course. I already insisted that this is something that > they must postpone until */after*/ the delivery deadline. > >> > I would estimate the time for completion at 5 pages an hour. > > Hmmm .. so that's 20 hours per 100 pages. So for the six books I list, > that's ~100 hrs = two weeks work. I hope it can be done a bit faster. > They are not going to like to hear 100 hours. In addition, there is also > the "possibility of migrating everything from FM to Word" floating > around at this particular client. So there is never much point in making > a big investment in FM book restructuring. > > > > On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 6:32 PM, Avraham Makeler <amakeler at gmail.com > <mailto:amakeler at gmail.com>> wrote: > > > > For a two books to be combined, both approximately 100 pages, and > if I had no familiarity with them, I would estimate the time for > completion at 5 pages an hour. > > > > and if I had no familiarity with them > > The SME said he will be doing the job of marking (in a PDF or in a > Word export) which blocks are shared. So then I "just" have to put > those marked blocks in a shared area or add conditional text constructs. > > avi > >
