Holy Wars and Contractors

["Marie C. Paretti" <mparetti -at- RRINC -dot- COM>]

I'm interested in the whole Holy Wars thread that has developed and the
question of what role the contractor should or shouldn't play in such
circumstances.  When I first skimmed Andrew's post I thought that what he
said made sense, but then I started reading the disagreements and they made
sense too - particularly the stuff about the right tool for the job and not
foisting decisions on anyone.  But then I went back and read Andrew's
original post and found this:

--------------------------
<snip>
At this client site, they decided to standardize to Word.  All of the
engineers, marketing people, etc. used Word for all the internal docs so it
seemed natural to do everything in Word.  Since they produce pretty simple
documentation and help files, I thought it was a good idea and started
helping them design some templates and such. Word is a pretty good tool.
Frame is too.  Both have their strengths and weaknesses.  For this company,
Word seemed like a good choice.  They were not doing really large documents
and needed portability between other departments (which know nothing about
Frame).
<snip>
--------------------------
From this bit, it seems, all the parties involved did take into account
whether or not they had the right tool for the job -- Andrew sketched out
the situation clearly here, and it's important to note that the decision to
use Word was an *internal* one -- he merely agreed with it.

The problem came because he was put in the middle of a conflict between the
majority and one person who resisted the decision.  We don't know much
about why that person resisted (Andrew?), but from Andrew's original post
it sounds like that resistance was going to cause problems in terms of
portability between users and, though he doesn't say this explicitly, make
it difficult for him to do his job and deliver the product he signed on for
(Andrew?).  He went to management and they asked him for a recommendation
-- and I'm presuming here that they meant a recommendation on what to do
about the lone hold out: let him continue to use Frame or force him to
switch to Word (and yes, Andrew's post does indicate that the holdout was a
"he").

Andrew wasn't recommending what software to use; he was making a
recommendation about how to manage the documentation.  And as I said, he
didn't decide on Word; he told management whether or not it made sense, in
the context of that particular company with its particular documentation
needs, to allow multiple documentation tools.

 The one question in my mind is "what was he contracted to do?"  If part of
his contract included organizing the tech pubs department and helping them
get themselves on track, then his recommendation to management was probably
not out of line -- that's what they hired him for.   If, on the other hand,
he was hired to write a single document, then we're in a different ball
game, or at least another inning.

The bottom line for me is that a contractor's role/responsibility depends
on what that particular contractor was hired to do.

My $0.02, FWIW.

Peace,
Marie

Marie C. Paretti
Recognition Research, Inc. (RRI)
1750 Pratt Drive, Suite 2000
Blacksburg, VA 24060
mparetti -at- rrinc -dot- com
http://www.rrinc.com