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.

Stupidity vs. incompetence

The team lawyer on my most minor active project sent an e-mail this morning with two different links, and the e-mail said that OGC had reviewed the final rule and had comments. She did not, however, put the edited version in the project folder, where the team can work on it.

I figured out that one of the links led to a usable version of the document. Next I had to decide what to do about it. Should I put it in the folder myself or not? It would probably save trouble for everyone, but while it could be called a reasonable assumption from the lawyer’s e-mail she didn’t explicitly ask me to, and even if she had I’m not supposed to do things unless explicitly asked by the project manager. And while some managers might notice and appreciate me taking the initiative, she wouldn’t.

In the end, I decided to do nothing and wait to be told. An e-mail later this morning vindicated me: it was the project manager asking the lawyer to put the document in the folder. The manager hadn’t found the correct link in the e-mail. So my inaction clearly hadn’t caused any problems yet, and who knows what confusion action might have caused.

 The lawyer, however, didn’t listen. She e-mailed the document to us as a file attachment. This is stupid. Version control, version control, version control. To keep things from getting any worse, I put it in the folder myself and sent an e-mail saying as much within two minutes. Yup, I’m on top of things, all right.

20 minutes after that, the project manager sent out an e-mail saying she had put the document in the folder. I checked, and there it was, right there with a different name next to the copy I had put there. I deleted the one I had put there and sent an e-mail saying as much. She replied saying no, “you can leave it,” she wants backup in case we lose the copy we’re working in because as far as she knows the link didn’t work, and she wants it in this other special folder she’s created for it. But wait, this confuses me – should I leave it where it is, or put it in the special folder? Which one?

This is what I get for trying to help. I should have just let the computer-illiterate and the incompetent figure it out between themselves.

Being the smartest person around is scary

This document I'm editing is giving me a headache.

For some perspective, I'm sick at the moment. Much better than yesterday, in which I took a half-day and shouldn't have gone in at all, but still, I've gone through at least six cough drops today and blown my nose four times and it's not even noon. And yet I can still say that the editing is responsible for the headache, because recent edits to the document by the lawyer were just that bad.

Most of the annoying bits were relatively minor mistakes, but annoying because I expect better of lawyers. I guess I was spoiled by an unusually good lawyer on the doomed project.

Also, she didn't send me the document with her edits at all. To the other team members, and one of them thought to CC me, but she didn't. How she thought her concerns would have been addressed I have no idea.

But the thing that really made my head throb was one bit where she asked if it matched the current boilerplate. It was hard for me to figure out the answer to that. The templates are in the middle of being revised. Separately, the Web site with the old versions changed to a new URL, so I couldn't find those on my own. I had to get my supervisor's help. I wanted to be extra sure about what was wrong on a project at this stage, so I painstakingly compared the old template and the new one to each other and to the relevant bit of the FR. That took half an hour or more.

What did I find in the end? I found that no, it didn't match the new template. Or the old one. Or any template, because there's no template for this bit. This bit is explicitly up to the team. And more specifically, the lawyer. There is no template, and this area is primarily her responsibility, and she effectively blamed me for incompetence because she didn't know that.

It never rains but it pours

For most of the past couple months, things have been relatively slow and easy. My projects haven't demanded much from me other than attending meetings. I have filled in for other writers or peer-reviewed their documents, but either way it's not as stressful and doesn't require as much careful attention as projects of my own do. I took a week-long vacation for Thanksgiving, and then on the first day back, had a medical emergency that kept me out of work for most of the following week. And right now it's the middle of the holiday season. There are holiday parties interrupting work and every project is slowing down because key people are on vacation or are about to be.

Except for those projects that are speeding up, in hopes of squeezing something out before the vacations. Like one of mine. A new project I was assigned to is trying to get things moving, and there's a kickoff meeting this afternoon.

And several projects of another writer's. Not only is he unusually busy at the moment, but he's going to be out for a while due to a medical problem of his own. My boss asked me yesterday if I could fill in for him on one of them. I said I wasn't sure, because of that kickoff project, but I was given the assignment anyway and told that things could be shuffled again afterwards if necessary. So I'm working on that now, and it needs quite a bit of work. It's not a huge rule, but it has a short deadline. I got started on that today, and it's been keeping me busy. Needs a fair amount of work, and it's a type of document for which guidance is lacking.

And then this morning, H. called to tell me about a meeting for the doomed project. It's been outside the building under the review of another agency for a couple months now, but someone just noticed overlap between the doomed project and another one. (I feel a bit guilty about this, because I had helped with the other project briefly, so maybe I could have called the problem to someone's attention earlier.) The two project teams are butting heads a bit about which one should change to accommodate the other. There was a meeting about it. It conflicted with the kickoff meeting for my other project. So I spent a lot of time today trying to figure out which meeting I should go to, and then preparing other writers for the other one.

So after a month of having nothing worth mentioning to do, I get a new project, do a lot of work on someone else's project, and have something go wrong on my most important project, all in one morning. How exciting.

I covered my ass...

My TVMP project published our notice last month. Someone immediately noticed a problem with it and we're now working on a correction. At a meeting Tuesday we discussed final lingering issues, whether we needed a table entry or a seven-word phrase in a note to the table or both or neither. Very minor stuff.

Wednesday the RDM e-mailed out the correction out to the legal office for review. Two minutes later she went on vacation for the week.

When I opened the file, I noticed several changes since the last version I had seen. Now, to be clear, this is bad. Every team member should see  the document in its final form before it goes out, and the tech writer should theoretically be last of all. On a quick glance, I didn't see anything that would cause big problems, but it's inconsistent and messy and not how things are supposed to work. This offends the anal-retentive, punctilious side of my personality, to the extent that I have one. I didn't want to retract the notice over non-substantive issues, though, especially not on my own nonexistent authority, so I left it alone for now.

Half an hour after the file was mailed out, someone else mailed out another version and suggested using his version over the RDM's. His version had his changes tracked, and while that's better for internal use, reviewers should see a clean document. His edits were also, in technical terms, shitty. There were missing spaces between words, the same thing formatted two different ways in one paragraph, and misspellings in words like "Los Angeles" and "although." This guy who was trying to speak for the team was also not on the team to begin with.

I had to get someone with authority involved in this. I checked the RDM's away message. It said her boss was filling in for her. Her boss's away message, though, said he hadn't been in since yesterday, and it was now 10:30, so I assumed he wasn't around at all. His boss was in the office, but also unavailable at the moment. I tried the team lawyer - beneath them, but still above me. I told her that I needed to review the document, giving her one example of a minor problem with it, and someone definitely needed to do something with the versions already out there.

She sent out a third version. This version fixed just that one problem I mentioned and left all the rest alone.

In the end, I cleaned up the document and brought the right people into the loop and this project remained unimportant, but I spent more sweat on it Wednesday than I had over the previous six months. It's not that I deserve a medal over it, I was just doing my job, but everyone else on the project deserves an anti-medal.

More broad, less deep

For a year or even more, about 80 percent has been on the doomed project, with the rest on two other projects. (I've called one "the blackmail project" and the other "the minor project," but really both were fairly minor.)

That seems to have changed, though. The doomed project doesn't demand so much from me now, while other projects have picked up. One, I was assigned to more than a year ago when the tech writer on it left, and then the project's document promptly left the building, so it's been mine according to the spreadsheet but there was nothing to do about it until it came back last month. And another project was similar. A tech writer left last month, and I was assigned a project of hers, and this past Wednesday the team met for the first time since May. All I've had to do so far was take minutes at that meeting and move a file around, but still, it's becoming more and more active.

This is a mixed blessing. I guess it's good for me. In theory, taking minutes at meetings is part of my job, but I haven't had to do it in a while, because on the doomed project that's what the other writer is for and my other two projects haven't had that kind of meeting in a while either. Stretching my thinking muscles in a lot of little ways - listening to the important stuff, figuring out meaning from context, concentrating on tasks even if they're boring.

That's a big part of the problem: buckling down and typing up my notes right away without getting distracted by things like this. Big surprise, I'm sure. Based on my typing speed in words per minute, I could turn my notes on a notepad into the official notes from a meeting in half an hour. Organizing it to make it logical and expanding on it beyond my personal shorthand would take another 10 or 20 minutes - still a very reasonable time for a minor task. But if I let myself go to reddit or do stuff like this, that could add four hours. I need to practice concentrating.

Beyond that, I've already been reminded of how much I depend on familiarity with a small number of projects. Just to type up those minutes I had to ask two different SMEs to explain things about which my notes were incomplete. This is part of the "listen closely" thing, and it's part of preparing myself in advance, but it's also partly inevitable. No way to be as familiar with new stuff as with old stuff.