It gets worse

My earlier post about the doomed project needs two updates. First of all, where I said that there had been a problem with people putting things in the regulation that we have neither room nor time for, but "that is under control by now"? Not even close. We had a meeting today about the status, and how to avoid getting further behind schedule, and getting everyones' bosses to stop putting more things in here was identified as a great way to keep things under control. No one could think of anything we could get away with removing that would save time going forward, though.

And second, there's probably yet another problem: me. I blamed the subject matter expert (or rather, the lead subject matter expert, or rather a subject matter expert) for not knowing his own job's responsibilities "at least, as far as they relate to mine". Over the past week, though, I've started to get the impression that I'm in the same situation. I'm pretty sure I've never written regulatory instructions before. Since I haven't, I've assumed that SMEs and/or lawyers do them. But I've mentioned this to my supervisors, and they sounded surprised. And you know, I was trained on it way back when I first started here, and why would the training include stuff that wasn't my responsibility? And you know, even if it is part of my job, it might never have come up until now. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a project I've done here that wasn't inherited from another tech writer who left for whatever reason, wasn't a continuation or offshoot of an earlier project, or wasn't a technical amendment that the lawyer basically had to write themselves. In every such case, most of the technical work was done before I got it.

So not only do some team members not know what they're doing, not only are we weeks behind schedule, not only have people still been putting new content in this up to now... I don't know what I'm doing either.

DOOMED.