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Re: Ever wonder why techwhirler lives seem so crazy? (a long rant)
Subject:Re: Ever wonder why techwhirler lives seem so crazy? (a long rant) From:"Jeanne A. E. DeVoto" <jaed -at- jaedworks -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Sun, 21 Apr 2002 16:48:44 -0700
At 10:29 AM -0700 4/21/2002, Bruce Byfield wrote:
>Jeanne A. E. DeVoto wrote:
>>No magic wand needed, as far as I've ever been able to tell. If when you
>>publish your schedule, the deadlines are clearly conditioned on development
>>milestones, and someone else on the team translates that into calendar
>>dates, doesn't shift your dates when your dependencies shift, and forgets
>>that you haven't committed to "May 5th, come hell or high water!", then
>>that is not your problem, is it? Your schedule is clear, and bad
>>assumptions on someone else's part don't constitute an emergency on your
>>part.
>>
>Well, I suppose you can work that way. But, for my part, I've never
>believed that tech-writing was simply a matter of keeping your head down
>and doing your immediate job while ignoring how you interact with
>others. So far as I'm concerned, part of the responsibility is keeping
>others informed. If your dependencies shift and the schedule doesn't,
>then you owe it to everyone you're working with to let them know and to
>work to change the schedule.
Well, of course. This should go without saying.
The problem comes in when you do see that there's a problem in updating the
schedule, and inform people, and your information is ignored (or management
gives you flak for "changing your schedule and endangering the project
schedule"). In this case, your published schedule, which clearly delineates
your dependencies and specifies exactly when your work is due, protects you
from such unfair blaming tactics.
Naturally, if you see that others are depending on an outdated schedule,
you point it out and help them determine the actual schedule.
(Side note: has my writing tone gone completely off the wall in the past
week without my realizing it, or what? Twice now I've gotten responses that
seem to me to be both snarkily disrespectful and dismissive of any
pretensions to professionalism I might have, and unjustified by what I've
actually said, from list members who do not normally behave this way. It's
bothering me.)
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