Work-to-rule is tempting

Two days ago the WMBD boss declared that, as H. put it, it was "Time to stop the music." He asked that any more requests for revisions "or anything to this effect" to the doomed project be referred to him, instead of addressed by me or the lawyer directly.

This fits what I've been calling him. He hopes this will prevent unimportant changes from further delaying the project. He's even said he's "just trying to protect" me. I really doubt it will help overall, though. He has little authority over the substance of the rule himself, so he won't be telling anyone, "Sorry, there's no more time for that change, it'll have to wait until after publication." I'm pretty sure I'll eventually have to put in the document whatever SMEs ask me to put in, whether or not they run it by WMBD and their own boss first. Anything kept out of the document at this stage is going to be put into it at the next one. At best, if another "hamster wheel" situation arises, he might deal with it more directly, but he's not in a position to notice that before they've gone around twice anyway.

So the advantage is the possibility of preventing one type of problem. The disadvantage is the certainty that every edit now has at least one additional layer of review. Call me a pessimist, but I already have an opinion about how this will work out.

Fortunately, we're being intelligent about it so far and interpreting the instruction loosely. It first came up at all this morning. A SME e-mailed me a request for a correction. One number had been mistyped, literally only one character, and I checked that he really was just reverting it to the previous correct version. According to instructions, I should have forwarded that to WMBD or just told the SME to contact WMBD and not done anything else with it myself, but that seemed a bit too ridiculous even for me. Instead, I made the change, e-mailed WMBD to check on it, left the change tracked pending his reply, and accepted the change when I heard from him an hour later. The lawyer has said she expects more minor wording changes soon and suggested e-mailing WMBD once for all of them.

We'll be fine as long as we don't have to take him seriously.