We told them so

We signed off on the doomed project and sent it off to another agency almost two years ago, after I had cut back on posting here but before I had stopped entirely. It got passed back and forth for a while with other agencies and finally published about two months ago or so. Maybe I should stop calling it doomed. But its problems didn't end when it left the building. I'll try to go over a few of the problems it had while I wasn't posting here.

Things went normally with it for about eight months. Normal was still pretty bad, but there's nothing we can do about it while another agency is reviewing it, so normal was good enough. Then one day, a team member's bosses' boss asked for something. This guy was responsible for both XYZ and Operational L__ even though no one else wanted them and they made the project take months longer. Now he was asking to have them taken out of the project. Collectively they were over a quarter of the 400-page document spread out in a dozen chunks. In the meeting where he asked to have them removed, we pointed out as delicately as possible how big a job this would be, how much it would delay the already-late project, and how he could have prevented it a year before simply by not including them. His idea of an apology was a shrug and an "Oops."

Taking notes at that meeting, I slowly got the impression of a situation that would be amazingly miserable for someone, probably not for me, but I couldn't be sure. It was like sidling up to the Grand Canyon on a windy day, and then seeing that it was filled to five feet below the edge with black plastic trash bags. My eyes were bugged out during the meeting, but when I found H. right afterwards and briefed her, I couldn't keep from laughing. I was hysterical, choking out the explanation of the problem. What else could I do?

And then, a few months later, after that was dealt with, the lawyer offhandedly asked me where to find the final draft of a letter. Another requirement for the review that generally should be relatively easy, and done at the same time as everything else. But it wasn't. We just forgot. And the removal of XYZ and Operational L__ made it harder, because we had to go through multiple files in the archive to see what should be listed in this letter. And we had to do all that on a tight deadline, because the rule actually was sort of kind of close to ready.

Taking pride in my work is bad.

Yesterday I thought I saw a good example of the importance of taking care, approaching problems with a fresh eye, and doing things right the first time. I should have known better.

One final rule has been stuck in one stage of clearance for a while. One TMBB got back to us over a month later than the other two. It was objectively harder to address her comments separately from the rest, and it was annoying that we had to. So we did as little as possible about them.

A week ago, we called it done and sent it back to the TMBBs. The only comment so far has been the WMBD boss asking for more clarity on two points. When I looked at that section again, one of the comments by the late TMBB jumped out at me. I remember resenting that comment. She suggested moving a certain sentence higher in the document. I thought that was dumb, because there was only one earlier section that it could have gone in and that was already too long, so we just replied that it was addressed by other edits. But yesterday morning it occurred to me that I could move it within the same section, which would also address part of the WMBD's comment. So I moved that sentence and added one more on the other point and asked what the team thought.

I was proud of this. I think it was clever to use one problem to solve another. It took a little creative wordsmithing to address the WMBD boss's second point clearly. At the same time, the problem is a good demonstration of "haste makes waste." If we had thought harder about the late TMBB's comments when we first got them, or if she had got them back to us when the other TMBBs did, we might have realized that earlier. Several different people made the same mistake. If I were a teacher or a manager I'd point to this as an example of how careful deliberation can matter.

Except that to some people, it didn't matter. All of the team got back to me promptly to say that they approved, except the lawyer. She'd need another day. This morning, she deleted the sentence I added about the second point because she felt it was redundant with the sentence before it. There are several problems with this.

1. Even if it is redundant, the WMBD guy asked us to add it. We don't have to do everything people should ask for, but should at least address it.
2. When I reread the section, I agreed with the WMBD guy. The previous version of the section could, in fact, have been clearer! Going into a bit more detail about the topic looks genuinely good!
3. If she doesn't like it, what's her alternative? She didn't say. Both the WMBD guy and I said specifically that there were two points to be discussed. She wanted to remove the discussion of one of them without doing anything in its place.

 In the end, the economist made a few edits to my phrasing, which apparently placated the lawyer, and it went back into clearance. But it was dumb of me to think that trying to do a thorough job would actually help.