Monday, February 27, 2012
Vacation
On vacation this week. I'm glad I scheduled it months in advance, because this week is a busy, important time on the doomed project and getting this time off approved would probably have been very hard under the current schedule. Of course, every week seems to be busy and important these days. But unlike previous vacations or simply long weekends, this time I feel relatively good about the state I left work in, so for now that can just be my someone else's problem.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Who's the boss?
One thing that has seemed weird to me over the past few days is responsibility and how it can be diffuse, or circular.
This probably happens to a lot of office jobs, in and out of government. At all previous jobs of mine the chain of responsibility was pretty clear: I had my boss, and he had his boss I probably knew of but interacted with little, and so on up depending on the size of the organization. There were no responsibilities outside that chain, except for basic human civility - I couldn't tell someone to fuck off if they asked me to put on overalls for a restaging of "American Gothic," but I could politely refuse if I felt like it, unless my boss decided it would be a good idea. Day-to-day work could get complicated, but in theory my responsibilities were very clear and direct.
That's not the case here, and probably isn't at most jobs in any Byzantine bureaucracy. The supervisor of tech writers assigns me to project teams. Each team has an RDM who sets the schedule and coordinates between all the other team members and is theoretically the only person on the team who tells me what to do. But RDMs aren't the experts, those are the SMEs, so when SMEs tell me what to do I usually just do it. And the RDMs aren't the SMEs' main bosses, their main bosses are in their own departments devoted to various subsets of this agency's regulatory mission. SMEs' responsibilities vary; one SME on the doomed project cared a great deal about how a certain phrase was worded and that phrase appears in almost every section of the document, but other than that, he only cares about two small sections that are all his own, about six pages out of 300. And finally there's the senior tech writer, who doesn't actually supervise me, but is supposedly the resident expert on the details of our job and works closely with my supervisor on who gets assigned to which project.
So SMEs shouldn't tell me what to do but often do so anyway but there are some things they still wouldn't get away with. The RDMs inform team members of deadlines and schedule meetings but can't actually do anything about it if people miss them. Every team member and their boss has an OCD-level attention to detail on certain topics and doesn't know or care about the rest. My supervisor keeps a close eye on what I'm doing but rarely actually tells me what to do.
The doomed project is a huge example of this fractal org chart, but something like it happens on every project because everyone on a team is responsible to their own boss more than they're responsible to anyone on the team.
This probably happens to a lot of office jobs, in and out of government. At all previous jobs of mine the chain of responsibility was pretty clear: I had my boss, and he had his boss I probably knew of but interacted with little, and so on up depending on the size of the organization. There were no responsibilities outside that chain, except for basic human civility - I couldn't tell someone to fuck off if they asked me to put on overalls for a restaging of "American Gothic," but I could politely refuse if I felt like it, unless my boss decided it would be a good idea. Day-to-day work could get complicated, but in theory my responsibilities were very clear and direct.
That's not the case here, and probably isn't at most jobs in any Byzantine bureaucracy. The supervisor of tech writers assigns me to project teams. Each team has an RDM who sets the schedule and coordinates between all the other team members and is theoretically the only person on the team who tells me what to do. But RDMs aren't the experts, those are the SMEs, so when SMEs tell me what to do I usually just do it. And the RDMs aren't the SMEs' main bosses, their main bosses are in their own departments devoted to various subsets of this agency's regulatory mission. SMEs' responsibilities vary; one SME on the doomed project cared a great deal about how a certain phrase was worded and that phrase appears in almost every section of the document, but other than that, he only cares about two small sections that are all his own, about six pages out of 300. And finally there's the senior tech writer, who doesn't actually supervise me, but is supposedly the resident expert on the details of our job and works closely with my supervisor on who gets assigned to which project.
So SMEs shouldn't tell me what to do but often do so anyway but there are some things they still wouldn't get away with. The RDMs inform team members of deadlines and schedule meetings but can't actually do anything about it if people miss them. Every team member and their boss has an OCD-level attention to detail on certain topics and doesn't know or care about the rest. My supervisor keeps a close eye on what I'm doing but rarely actually tells me what to do.
The doomed project is a huge example of this fractal org chart, but something like it happens on every project because everyone on a team is responsible to their own boss more than they're responsible to anyone on the team.
Preaching to the choir
I spent most of yesterday morning in a plain language writing workshop, along with a couple dozen tech writers, lawyers, economists and other people. It was mostly a lecture and some focused exercises on improving prose qua prose, such as by avoiding pretentious Latin and using clearer wording. I also appreciated learning that I could use certain organizational techniques I hadn't thought of before in rulemaking documents. It was an example of a good speech, too: genuinely humerous anecdotes rather than forced jokes, PowerPoint used well, a little audience participation to keep people on their toes. It wasn't perfect - some verbal chaff, some mechanical glitches with videos - but much better than usual around here. So, good stuff overall.
I'm annoyed, though, that certain people weren't there. The unhelpful guy wasn't. Nor was the engineer who wouldn't let me simplify a requirement recently, saying that it would be fine as is because if I could understand it then anyone could. Nor were any SMEs, as far as I could tell.
That's misguided, because they need the help more than I do. Sure, I just got dinged for my writing recently, but I still manage to be up to professional caliber when I'm thinking about it. Some people here write badly enough that they'd probably get failing grades in college classes on the subjects they're experts in. It's a shame that their bosses didn't expect them to come to this the way mine did.
I'm not bringing this up just as a "writing well is really, really important, mmmkay?" PSA, not just because I parochially believe in the importance of my personal field, not just to regurgitate reassurances I heard for 10 years about how writing is actually a valuable skill even though the Computer Science majors and MBAs are the ones who made big bucks right out of college. The reason I wish SMEs had been at the meeting is because they do more of the writing than me, so it would save time in the long run if they did it better. This is inefficient. This is government waste.
As I've said, both on version control and way back in my second post here, a lot of the work I do could be done better or made unnecessary to start with by other people. The more time SMEs would spend thinking about putting things into their logical order and avoiding jargon, the fewer questions I'd have to ask them and meetings we'd have to have and rounds of review documents would have to go through. I know I can't complain too much about inefficiencies that keep me employed in a relatively easy job, but it's still annoying.
I'm annoyed, though, that certain people weren't there. The unhelpful guy wasn't. Nor was the engineer who wouldn't let me simplify a requirement recently, saying that it would be fine as is because if I could understand it then anyone could. Nor were any SMEs, as far as I could tell.
That's misguided, because they need the help more than I do. Sure, I just got dinged for my writing recently, but I still manage to be up to professional caliber when I'm thinking about it. Some people here write badly enough that they'd probably get failing grades in college classes on the subjects they're experts in. It's a shame that their bosses didn't expect them to come to this the way mine did.
I'm not bringing this up just as a "writing well is really, really important, mmmkay?" PSA, not just because I parochially believe in the importance of my personal field, not just to regurgitate reassurances I heard for 10 years about how writing is actually a valuable skill even though the Computer Science majors and MBAs are the ones who made big bucks right out of college. The reason I wish SMEs had been at the meeting is because they do more of the writing than me, so it would save time in the long run if they did it better. This is inefficient. This is government waste.
As I've said, both on version control and way back in my second post here, a lot of the work I do could be done better or made unnecessary to start with by other people. The more time SMEs would spend thinking about putting things into their logical order and avoiding jargon, the fewer questions I'd have to ask them and meetings we'd have to have and rounds of review documents would have to go through. I know I can't complain too much about inefficiencies that keep me employed in a relatively easy job, but it's still annoying.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
If I cared, I'd be offended
You know, I really can be far more optimistic and good-natured than is reasonable.
Sure, the fact that blog exists is disrespectful to my supervisors in a way, and its content is full of negativity of various kinds. And while I don't talk about politics much here I'm pretty cynical in that sphere of life as well. Interpersonally, though, I'm sympathetic to a fault. H. and other people have expressed surprise at how willing I am to give people the benefit of the doubt.
I bring all this up because I realized that I probably do that too much. Sometimes people just fuck up, and sometimes that makes my job harder, and it would probably be more normal and healthy for me to resent them and think less of them for it. Maybe they're a good person overall just handling work badly, maybe not, who knows, but so what? They're still making my life harder for no good reason.
To combine two ongoing plot threads of this blog, the "well-meaning-but-dumb" boss is what I generally call someone in the context of being a bad speaker at meetings, but that person also happens to be one of H.'s bosses. A lot of the mismanagement of the doomed project is either done by him, or a result of him not handling others better. So what if he phrases requests politely? So did Bill Lumbergh, and Lumbergh was an asshole.
Sure, the fact that blog exists is disrespectful to my supervisors in a way, and its content is full of negativity of various kinds. And while I don't talk about politics much here I'm pretty cynical in that sphere of life as well. Interpersonally, though, I'm sympathetic to a fault. H. and other people have expressed surprise at how willing I am to give people the benefit of the doubt.
I bring all this up because I realized that I probably do that too much. Sometimes people just fuck up, and sometimes that makes my job harder, and it would probably be more normal and healthy for me to resent them and think less of them for it. Maybe they're a good person overall just handling work badly, maybe not, who knows, but so what? They're still making my life harder for no good reason.
To combine two ongoing plot threads of this blog, the "well-meaning-but-dumb" boss is what I generally call someone in the context of being a bad speaker at meetings, but that person also happens to be one of H.'s bosses. A lot of the mismanagement of the doomed project is either done by him, or a result of him not handling others better. So what if he phrases requests politely? So did Bill Lumbergh, and Lumbergh was an asshole.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Me and my big mouth
There was a sub-department meeting yesterday that seemed annoying and pointless to me. The bulk of the meeting was the WMBD boss talking about the roles and job descriptions of everyone in the sub-department. He got questions, so I guess there was some subtext or underlying issue that he had to clear up - and if so, see previous comments about him being a bad communicator; stuff like that shouldn't go unsaid - but from where I sat the meeting was just a discussion of what everyone in the room already knew.
Today, though, I've been tempted to ask my immediate supervisors questions like that. Because I'm getting caught in the middle of the latest round of problems with the doomed project. Background: officially, the only people on project teams I'm supposed to take orders from are H. and maybe R., the lawyer. Realistically, though, H. knows as little about substantive issues as me, and they both have other jobs to do, so when a SME asks me to do something relatively simple with the document, I don't bother running it by H. or the lawyer first.
So I didn't think twice when a SME asked to meet up with me so we could resolve a dozen or so relatively minor issues in the document. After the meeting was over she mentioned to me offhandedly that big changes to a certain section were in the pipeline. That sounded ominous. I asked if we should let H. know. The SME said no, because H. had this crazy idea that people were going around behind her back and cutting her out of the loop. So we shouldn't tell H. this because it would just encourage that.
The problem with that should be obvious.
Today, though, I've been tempted to ask my immediate supervisors questions like that. Because I'm getting caught in the middle of the latest round of problems with the doomed project. Background: officially, the only people on project teams I'm supposed to take orders from are H. and maybe R., the lawyer. Realistically, though, H. knows as little about substantive issues as me, and they both have other jobs to do, so when a SME asks me to do something relatively simple with the document, I don't bother running it by H. or the lawyer first.
So I didn't think twice when a SME asked to meet up with me so we could resolve a dozen or so relatively minor issues in the document. After the meeting was over she mentioned to me offhandedly that big changes to a certain section were in the pipeline. That sounded ominous. I asked if we should let H. know. The SME said no, because H. had this crazy idea that people were going around behind her back and cutting her out of the loop. So we shouldn't tell H. this because it would just encourage that.
The problem with that should be obvious.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Long-windednessitude
Resolution: to be more concise. Succinct. Brief. Direct. (Oh, hell.)
I had my annual performance evaluation this morning. It went well overall - yay, three percent raise - but one criticism my supervisors had of me was in the "written communication" part of the matrix, for my tendency to elaborate too much or be candid beyond the bounds of my position. In formal e-mails to the entire team of the doomed project, apparently I shouldn't say things like, "let's hope it works out this time. Knock on wood." And I need to be more aware about getting to the point. If someone doesn't read all of an e-mail and screws things up because of that, I'm inclined to blame the reader on a personal level, but I have to admit I could have prevented the problem by not burying the main point of it in the first place.
On the whole, this criticism didn't surprise or bother me. H. has mentioned something like that before, and a lot of the e-mails I got dinged for were written in relatively harried and stressful situations so of course there would be some problem, and I got good reviews otherwise. So, hey, no one's perfect.
There were two reasons that it did get to me, though. First because I write in my free time right here and aspire to write even more, so written communication should ideally be one of my relative strengths, not weaknesses. And second, it just so happened that this afternoon I made exactly the same mistake in a personal e-mail as well. Making plans for this evening, my girlfriend said that she'd be getting off work early. I replied that that was cool, and in theory I could do the same based on hours worked so far this week, so it was too bad that I was so busy I'd probably have to work until the last minute. She missed the last part of that, requiring an e-mail to a third party and a call to her office interrupting her work. Heh, um, whoops.
Well, oversharing isn't a problem in a personal blog meant for reflecting about work. Practice writing is practice writing, and it gives future or hypothetical readers the idea of what my job is like. But it's funny that a post explaining my resolution to be more concise wound up being 429 words. So I'll really try to watch this in the future. As a writing exercise, maybe I should even do a more concise version of this post later just as a challenge to myself.
I had my annual performance evaluation this morning. It went well overall - yay, three percent raise - but one criticism my supervisors had of me was in the "written communication" part of the matrix, for my tendency to elaborate too much or be candid beyond the bounds of my position. In formal e-mails to the entire team of the doomed project, apparently I shouldn't say things like, "let's hope it works out this time. Knock on wood." And I need to be more aware about getting to the point. If someone doesn't read all of an e-mail and screws things up because of that, I'm inclined to blame the reader on a personal level, but I have to admit I could have prevented the problem by not burying the main point of it in the first place.
On the whole, this criticism didn't surprise or bother me. H. has mentioned something like that before, and a lot of the e-mails I got dinged for were written in relatively harried and stressful situations so of course there would be some problem, and I got good reviews otherwise. So, hey, no one's perfect.
There were two reasons that it did get to me, though. First because I write in my free time right here and aspire to write even more, so written communication should ideally be one of my relative strengths, not weaknesses. And second, it just so happened that this afternoon I made exactly the same mistake in a personal e-mail as well. Making plans for this evening, my girlfriend said that she'd be getting off work early. I replied that that was cool, and in theory I could do the same based on hours worked so far this week, so it was too bad that I was so busy I'd probably have to work until the last minute. She missed the last part of that, requiring an e-mail to a third party and a call to her office interrupting her work. Heh, um, whoops.
Well, oversharing isn't a problem in a personal blog meant for reflecting about work. Practice writing is practice writing, and it gives future or hypothetical readers the idea of what my job is like. But it's funny that a post explaining my resolution to be more concise wound up being 429 words. So I'll really try to watch this in the future. As a writing exercise, maybe I should even do a more concise version of this post later just as a challenge to myself.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Beating expectations
I just left a meeting about the doomed project in a good mood. Except for one paragraph the lawyer has to write, and half a dozen things the lead SME is still waiting for word on, we're around where we were supposed to be by last Friday.
That sounds very depressing when I summarize it, but considering that a meeting this morning went even worse, and considering that yesterday I thought we wouldn't be this far for another day, I still feel pretty good about it.
Also, "my" "official" review of the doomed project started this past Monday. I was dreading it, and so far that seems justified. Yesterday afternoon's post is the kind of thing I have to deal with on a big, rough project written by many different people. As for the messed-up scheduling of this one, yesterday morning's vignette was part of the problem. Happily, though, yesterday's vignette was talking about almost a third or so of the rule, and if - and I hesitate to even get my hopes up this much - if we really are down to one paragraph from the lawyer and half a dozen things for the lead SME to check, then that really is a big improvement.
That sounds very depressing when I summarize it, but considering that a meeting this morning went even worse, and considering that yesterday I thought we wouldn't be this far for another day, I still feel pretty good about it.
Also, "my" "official" review of the doomed project started this past Monday. I was dreading it, and so far that seems justified. Yesterday afternoon's post is the kind of thing I have to deal with on a big, rough project written by many different people. As for the messed-up scheduling of this one, yesterday morning's vignette was part of the problem. Happily, though, yesterday's vignette was talking about almost a third or so of the rule, and if - and I hesitate to even get my hopes up this much - if we really are down to one paragraph from the lawyer and half a dozen things for the lead SME to check, then that really is a big improvement.
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