For all other activities project managers will rely on evaluation findings to scope the workload and duration for each activity. Even for translation work, it is advisable to ask linguists to assign a complexity factor to the source text. It is important to monitor throughput of completed projects. By recording statistics for projects completed by the vendor, it is possible to calculate an aggregate through put for certain types of projects.

It is important to build in a contingency plan when scheduling workloads and durations for the various project activities. Many project managers add 10% to the duration of each task to allow for slippages or other unforeseen problems. Another option is to add a few days of contingency at the end of the project schedule.

Resource Assignment

Once all activities, their dependencies, sequence, and durations have been established, assign resources to each activity. Availability of resources could also have a huge influence on the project planning. Finding translators for localization projects with Japanese as source language and German as target language, for example, will be much more difficult than finding resources for standard English into German translation work.

The combination of volumes, resource availability, quality, and deadlines will dictate how many resources need to be assigned to a particular task. A 50,000 word project with a one week delivery schedule would require five translators. Assuming they will all translate 2,000 words of raw translation per day, they may be forced to skip editing and proofreading. Assigning so many people to a relatively small job will almost certainly damage language consistency and overall quality.

For projects that are localized into multiple languages, determine where certain activities need to take place, such as engineering or desktop publishing. Centralizing these activities has the advantage of leveraging experience across languages, but may cause a bottleneck towards the end of the project, because all languages need to be finalized and delivered within the same period. It is advisable to stagger these activities for each language to avoid resource problems.

Note that each scheduled activity has a cost estimate attached to it. The cost estimates from the quotation need to be compared with the costs of the resources that have been scheduled.

Milestones

Once all required information is present, set milestones for the project. A milestone is a task with no specific duration. It normally refers to a delivery to or from the publisher. This could be a new version or updated version of the product. In localization projects,

a milestone usually is a point in time where a predefined set of deliverables is ready. Delivery of the source material from the publisher to the localization vendor is also a milestone which needs to be included in the schedule. All other project milestones

depend on this first one.

Project managers can put as much detail in milestones as they want. Usually the milestones communicated to the publisher only include deliveries or hand-offs to the publisher, either final deliveries or review steps. For production staff, project managers will create many more milestones, for example hand-off of source material to translators, delivery of translated material to QA, hand-off of engineered software to testing, and delivery of screen captures to DTP.

Project milestones will be linked to dates, and the project activities will be scheduled between milestones.

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