Rewrite, One for One

How to use dispositions

Definition

Rewrite each piece of content individually (not by a Subject Matter Expert).

This is an expensive, manual, brute force approach. It's also the easiest to understand. That said, it's a bit more subtle than may be obvious. In particular, you want to make sure that you're only rewriting high value content — in virtually no case should you mass rewrite all your content (for one thing, if you are making dramatic changes it may make sense to delete other content so you can better concentrate on rewriting more valuable content).

When to assign this disposition to content:

Only for high importance content
Usually in conjunction with lower touch dispositions (including deleting) for lower value content
Make sure you aren't also sorting and placing the content, or it's not this disposition
Only for content that is underperforming

Related:

Rewrite, by Subject Matter Expert
Rewrite, and Regroup Pages

System-wide startup effort

high

This one has crucial preparation steps that you do NOT want to skip before starting on actually rewriting any content. This is because there is so much manual effort that you really want to make sure to not require rework. Some items you want in place first:

Clear guidelines / style guide
Any training in place if you are requiring people to be more sophisticated in their content work (or if there is a renewed user focus that requires training)
Understanding of how the content that is rewritten will be templated in the new setup
Actual implementation of these templates (so people can see the impact of using those terms when they are rewriting)
Preferably standards enforced in the templates (such as word counts)

Average per-item manual effort

4 hours

Effort per (potential) handling step:

Step	Effort	What is this?
Sort	skipped	Decide what to do with content item
Place	skipped	Place in IA
Edit	high	Edit text/content (NOT technical)
Move / Transform	high	Physically move/enter/transform content (NOT the words)
Enhance / Tag	low	Prepare the metadata, especially tagging/retagging
QA	high	Review content for quality

More on estimating effort: article | webinar | slideshare | mini-report.