How to appease a consultant?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Lady Lurker reports: <<The company hired a consultant who will be here until
October... Well, I tried to be diplomatic but I really thought what he'd
written was a piece of crap.>>

Sounds like. One thing you'll want to do is clearly separate whether it's
the writing style or the facts he's presenting that poses the problem; if
it's the former, there are things you can do to make the best of the
situation (see below), but if it's the latter, his manager really needs to
know that the guy's not doing his job or is doing it badly. Whether you want
that manager to terminate the consultant is another matter; it can be
difficult to do so without openiing yourself up to wrongful dismissal suits,
and sometimes managers prefer to duck the problem and hope it solves itself.
And if not, you've created a confrontation that might be best avoided
because of how it will reflect on you. (Doing the right thing isn't going to
earn you much credit if you step on too many toes and cause too much grief
along the way.)

<<Although he copied basically the entire company when he sent me the
document, I went to him *personally* and said the document was a good
beginning but maybe in the future, we might want to consider explaining
procedures in an ordered format (as opposed to one long never-ending
sentence - didn't say that), referencing the screen shots, using 
second-person throughout the document, consider that the help files should
vary a little from the manual... fifteen minutes later, the engineering
manager calls me into his office to say that "Paul" was upset and didn't
appreciate me commenting on his work.  The manager was laughing the entire
time but suggested that I speak to him and just leave him alone.>>

If you actually expressed things the way you did, it's no wonder he got
upset. (It's also possible he's a chauvinist, scared he'll be discovered to
be a poor writer, and so on. I won't speculate about those possibilities.)
One way to approach such problems is to provide a sample of the
documentation _you_ created thus far and simply present your approach as
company style. He may argue, but point out that he'll be gone in a few
months whereas you'll be here for the foreseeable future, and that
eventually the docs will all have to follow similar styles anyway. If what
he's written is both complete and accurate, you can point out that he's done
a good job of the research and that you're only proposing breaking up and
reformatting what he's already written. Of course, if the facts are wrong
and many are missing, you need to bring this to the manager's attention and
let the manager deal with this. If the guy's incompetent, he's incompetent,
and the manager has to do something about it.

<<I still have 3 weeks left on my probation period, he's here until October,
how would you suggest I deal with him?>>

For one thing, recognize that you're hoping to be there long after he
leaves, so make sure you smooth over the current problem with your manager,
then wait out your probation period. Once you've got "tenure", you can be a
bit more aggressive about solving the problem by explaining it to your
manager and showing him that you're right and that your approach is better.
Nothing speaks quite so clearly as a good example of effective
documentation. If the contractor is basically doing sound work, but just
presenting it poorly, spend the next 3 months simply biting your lip and
considering him to be working as your researcher, accepting the fact that
you'll eventually have to revise what he's created for you as a first draft.
Then set about establishing a documentation standard based on what you're
already doing so that future writers can refer to that standard. Make sure
the relevant managers understand that there's now a standard, and that
future writers must come see you about how to implement it. The techwr-l
archives contain many examples of discussions on how to make this change in
mindset in your management.

<<Can  someone give me any ideas on how to appease him?>>

You don't need to appease him; you just need to coexist for a few months.
It's your manager whom you must manage, and leave the appeasing to that
manager. You mentioned that the prevailing attitude is "any docs are better
than none", and that's actually true when you're first getting a product out
the door. But once that's done, you certainly want to improve the docs as
much as possible. It's going to be your job to gradually change the current
attitude to "better docs are better", and figure out how to develop that
mentality in management. Again, we've discussed this in some depth over the
years on techwr-l, so check the archives.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"User's advocate" online monthly at
www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/usersadvocate.html

"In seeking wisdom, the first step is silence, the second listening, the
third remembering, the fourth practicing, the fifth -- teaching
others."--Ibn Gabirol, poet and philosopher (c. 1022-1058)

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