The lead subject matter expert on the doomed project has been forbidden from seeing his family until there's some kind of progress on the project*. Unfortunately, this means that he's going around trying to resolve lingering issues. Saying that it sounds good to clean up lingering issues would be banal, but this is not the time for it.
First of all, the lawyers have the document to review the changes made in this review. Someone else in the document working on something else introduces version control issues and just generally gets messy. And secondly, right now I'd estimate that at least half the comments in the document are not the kind of thing anyone needs to worry about. Some are repetitive: there's a question about how to format the name of something, the name is used a dozen different places, and there's a comment pointing it out at almost every instance. Others are notes to self: the lawyer or I thought of something but couldn't take care of it right that minute, so we put a note in so we wouldn't forget, but it's still something we can take care of ourselves and other people don't need to worry about it. The lawyer will clean up a lot of her notes to herself, and the first thing I'll do when the lawyer is done with it is clean up the repetitive comments and stuff like that. So the lead SME could save everyone a lot of trouble if he just waited until I'd done that.
Unfortunately, he can't, due to his boss's ultimatum. So he's sent out several e-mails about individual issues and this morning he asked me to send him a copy of the document so he can work on things while the lawyer has the document occupied for her own work. (I almost told him he didn't need my help for that, but at the last minute I realized the last thing I want to do is encourage a greater involvement and more hands-on approach by anyone.) I don't know exactly what specific goals the lead SME was given, if any, but I hope he can be satisfied by having comments resolved by next week, which has been the schedule for the past month and (so far) we're still on track to meet that.
As for me, things on the doomed project are slow for me this week, because like I said, the lawyer's in there. Just in time for people to try to get my other two projects moving**, but anyways.
* No, that is not hyperbole. His family lives about four states away. He apparently has been in the habit of taking frequent three- or four-day weekends to see them, using RDOs and/or time off as he accumulates it. His boss is not letting him do that at the moment. So it's not hyperbole, but it's not quite as tyrannical as it sounds either.
** I suppose I should be grateful they're doing it now instead of next week or last week. It's hard to appreciate, though. I am still doing some work on the doomed project these days and am anxious about what's coming up, so it's a bit annoying to have meetings on projects that really don't matter as much and, despite their own problems, are in much better shape overall.
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