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1. Do your best to develop a friendly, professional relationship with
the software engineer. Your ability to work well together is crucial not
only to your company's success, but also to avoiding high blood pressure
readings.
2. Is there literally nobody in charge? Who hired you? Who signed off on
the documentation procedures? Who signs your paychecks? *Someone* has to
make decisions when there's no consensus.
3. In any case, don't do what the engineer did! If you plan to send
additional documentation to the customer, make sure the engineer knows
about it first. Demonstrate open communication by your example.
Good luck!
Dan Goldstein
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sarah
> Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2005 3:45 PM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: Updated documentation
> The small start-up where I work is still in anarchy mode, so
> I have situations such as this: a software engineer was
> contacted directly by a customer, asking for instructions on
> a procedure. The engineer wrote up the instructions in
> whatever format pleased him, sent out the documentation, and
> then notified me of his fait accompli. We have procedures in
> place for documentation, which include review and approval,
> and this guy simply bypassed them. I know there will be no
> consequences to him. :) My problem is this: I have now
> reviewed, edited and properly formatted his instructions. It
> is now authorized for distribution to customers.
> My question is: should I go ahead and send the updated,
> proper document to the customer? Would it be confusing for
> them to receive two documents that said essentially the same
> thing? Should I wait until there is an upgrade? I would
> rather our customer had a well-structured, proper-English
> document (which IMHO is much easier to understand) with part
> numbers and everything, but possibly it would cause more
> confusion than it is worth. Has anyone else been through this
> sort of thing? What did your company do?
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