Making it up as we go

The timeline on the doomed project is becoming surreal.

There's always a little flexibility in project timelines to account for extra steps needed for specific projects like the "blackmail project", or people missing deadlines. That's just how things work, probably at any office. But on the doomed project, things are deviating from the usual schedule so much that probably only six people out of dozens involved know what's going on at the moment.

It's mostly due to the deadline, which as I've said is the biggest problem. Somehow, someone got the reasonable-sounding idea that we should rearrange things to save time in the long term. Normally, our bosses first see a document that's supposed to be finished. Hopefully the team members keep their bosses in the loop about what we're planning, of course, but they don't see any product until it's as ready as possible. If they like it, and if everyone higher up the chain of reviewers does too of course, it could be published the way they see it. Of course, reviewers often have changes to make. Changing any one part of the substance of a regulation also requires rephrasing it to get it in legalese, and rewriting the summary and justification parts.

So, the thinking went, why not just ask for an "informal review" of the substance itself? That way we could write the legalese and summaries only once, without needing major edits afterwards, after we were confident the substance was solid, right? Wouldn't that save time in the long run?

Well, maybe. You can always say "what if". But we were expecting and hoping for, I don't know, let's say 20 or 50 comments and/or edits, and we got back over 350. This is partly because some team members apparently didn't keep their bosses in the loop all that well, despite reminders, as H. has vented to me. Many questions have been about issues that the team thought were settled. This is also partly because they couldn't see each others' comments. The idea of working in one single document, stored in a folder on the network accessible to all, is apparently beyond some people. Admittedly, it's not a perfect system; multiple people can't work on it at the same time that way. But (with broad enough deadlines like we had here) that's a very minor problem compared to the huge benefit of having multiple people be able to see each others' changes right in the same document. So instead, people created copies and made their changes there and e-mailed them around and it was up to me to combine all the versions. In addition to making unnecessary work for me, this also means that one reviewer couldn't see what another had said. So probably more than a third of all issues were raised by multiple people in at least some way.

And finally, it's partly because many of the bosses didn't understand what we meant by "informal review". In their defense, this is indeed a rare-if-not-unique step. Fair enough, it's something they haven't been asked to do before. In their reproof, I don't know how we could have made it clearer. We said in the e-mail asking them to do this what we were asking them for. The document is quite clearly, obviously, not finished. The team left comments of our own in the margin for reviewers to read; I would think that implies that it is a work in progress and we know it. And yet we still got over 10 comments saying, in effect, "I don't understand why this isn't in the finalized format." To which the only possible answer is, "we told you why in the e-mail. Remember it?"

But anyways, the idea that the normal way would probably have been even more work is cold comfort when an extra step we created turned out to be so huge.