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In my current job, I've never been told to stay away from the SMEs. Actually, the developers here are really good about working with us.
_However_, in a previous job we were told not to bother the developers and to get all of our information from customer service. The funny thing was that customer service wasn't allowed access to the developers either. So their information wasn't, shall we say, up to date. We started catching the developers at lunch or just in the hallways and worked to establish relationships that way. Then we could just saunter on over to development and hang out with them, and also get information from them. Management found out at some point, and conceded that we needed to talk to the developers to produce the documentation, but they excluded certain topics we could discuss, such as upcoming features and bugs. Of course, we had to talk about those issues with the developers, and we did. By that point, at least in the relationship I established with my primary SME, we were already contributing ideas to the application design directly to our SMEs. :-) Eventually, management found out again, and conceded that we needed to cover those topics.
This was a company wide problem, lack of communication. Over the course of about a year, the company _slowly_ started to allow more communication between departments, and so our jobs got a little easier. I should also mention that there had been no docs department prior to our arrival which would, in part, explain the level of plain distrust that we were exposed to.
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Sean Hower
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