A large number of manuals and languages required an adequate number of quality control specialists on our side (to perform formal translation checks and file layout checks after DTP), as well as a number of DTP specialists. It was necessary to determine the number of people to be involved in the project based on the expected workload. It was also vital to take into account other localization requests from Brother and other customers that would have come at the same time as the series of ADS manuals.
To cope with this challenge, we used Microsoft Project, which allowed us to correlate the stages of the project, the workload and the free time of those carrying out the work. For each language we created tasks in Project according to the schedule: translation, formal quality control, DTP, PDF verification, etc.
A person to carry out the work was assigned to each task. To determine the number of employees that would be required, we appointed virtual DTP and QA employees instead of real ones. Then we examined the percentage of a workload. At the same time, we specified a limitation for each virtual employee: no more than 6 hours a day could be spent on an ADS project, so that there was a margin of time for other projects.
Thus, we determined that we would need 7 DTP specialists and 7 QA specialists. After that we optimized the schedule: tasks for each language were distributed so that there was no peak load. Then the required number of employees was reduced to 5 DTP specialists and 5 QA specialists.