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I suspect you're a really good person in a tense situation who doesn't want
to appear to be the "bad coworker" or the "nasty PHB." You've caved to his
demands/complaints too many times, and it's counter-productive in the
extreme. It's time to do the hard but right thing for you and your company.
You're already doing all the work, and building a case for a substantial
ulcer in the process. If he's a contractor, you're under no obligation to do
things his way, you do not need or have to use his supposedly fabulous
template, or accept the excuses for not doing the work. He failed to provide
the deliverables he contracted for (and your Support Manager seems to
concur)... cut him loose and move on. I bet you find that you can get a
significantly higher amount of work done when you're no longer dealing with
arguments, excuses and rework. If you can't get rid of him for political
reasons, then you should consider a move yourself... no one can handle a
stress level like this forever.
Good luck
Connie P. Giordano
The Right Words
Communications & Information Design
"It's kind of fun to do the impossible." - Walt Disney
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+connie=therightwordz -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+connie=therightwordz -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On
Behalf Of SB
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 2:50 PM
To: Gene Kim-Eng
Cc: TECHWR-L
Subject: Re: Writers job description/definition
Well, I don't think that he views this as reduced contribution.
He is focused on doing things right. Of course, there is no end to how right
you can do things. So, he formats and formats and formats his heart's
contents. And he proofreads again and again. Of course this is very nice but
he never meets the deadlines. I don't have the time to proofread what I do,
partially because most of what he does not do falls back on me.
See, I had a MAJOR update of a 725 page document. I had two months to do it.
It was inhuman. On top of that, I had to give him a lot of support and
feedback on this new project. He had 3 doc he had to work on: a getting
started guide (10 pages or so), an already existing User Manual and an
Installation Manual.
So for two weeks, he worked on the getting started guide. While I had
another urgent project, I offered to help him so that he could meet the
deadline. He gave me half of his User Manual (this is how he split it) and I
edited and formatted it in one day. After 5 days, he is still not done with
the second half but that is because he is now waiting for the Getting
Started Guide, which I also took over from him. This is what happened with
that:
I could hear what was going on and he knew that the deadline was extremely
tight but he thought it was useful to proofread all the warnings at the
beginning of the document, warnings that are in all of our documentation and
I have never read most of them, assuming that whoever put them in there
checked the contents. He asked me to review only the warnings but I reviewed
the whole document (10 pages), despite the amount of pressure I am
under. So, yes, there were mistakes indeed but to me these warnings were
trivial and we could definitely have reviewed that at a time where we didn't
have an insane deadline (and knowing it too). To me, since I am responsible
for the documentation, the important issue was to verify the contents of the
Getting Started Guide.
What I read was inaccurate and incomplete. I had somewhere around 120
remarks on those 10 pages, some of which were trivial, some of which were
extremely important. I didn't send them to anyone else to give him a chance
to take care of it. I was not angry or upset, just could not understand how
you write a getting started guide without looking at the product. He got
very offended and told me that he could find plenty of mistakes in my
documentation too if he wanted, which is true, only unfortunately, I don't
have the luxury that he does.
He went to complain on my remarks and we were both told that there was no
time to make the changes, some of which were trivial but others were really
important. So, I accepted that and sent out an email with my comments to
everybody in charge saying that I thought that the user would not be able to
install the product with this piece of paper and that I understood that we
could not make changes but that I recommend that the document be tested
before the release. The Support Manager immediately said that I was right
and that it could not be released like that and he had it tested. The
document failed to provide the necessary information. So, it became my
project to update it, me and my big mouth.
So, while I was doing good progress despite the setbacks, I offered to
format to rest of the User Manual to let him work on the Installation Manual
only. He told me that maybe I should take the Installation Manual, which
still needed to be completely written, and that it was easier for him to do
the formatting. Well, my other project is now on hold and I am doing this
guy's job. Seriously, it took me one day to format half of the manual, even
if he had a couple of questions, why after five days is his part not done
yet? Oh, of course now he is "waiting for the changes" that were made in the
Getting Started Guide.
Him and I had a few arguments. I asked him to update the warnings in my
manual since he had spent so much time on them. He said that it as only half
an hour. I know that he spent on it three whole days and that he had them
reviewed and had sat with SMEs to change them. I told him that this was
definitely more important than the Getting Started Guide itself, especially
that it has been like that for the past three years at least and now was the
right moment to fix this. However, regarding the contents of the Getting
Started, he said that this is what the SMEs gave him. I told him that SMEs
are not supposed to communicate things to users.
The other big argument I had with him is that he decided that we have to
work with a template, which is true, we have to. So he decided to change
everything, the layout, the way things work etc. He came up with igneous
solutions such as no spacing before and after, which causes a LOT of
additional work. He calls the styles by his choice, meaning that applying
this to the rest of the documentation will be a major problem.
We had to outsource the famous User Manual because the document was a
conversion from a PDF and was a mess. The lady that formatted it used his
template. It took her 60 hours to format the document (260 pages) and
she didn't finish it. So, when I finally HAD to use his template, I saw that
he just did what he wanted, reinvented the wheel with his ingenious ideas
and it was no wonder that this woman took that long to format the document.
He even said that "footers" are difficult to do. Excuse-me? Are talking
about professionals here? Well, I could see why the footers were difficult
to do the way the template is set up. The more I was doing the formatting,
the more I was getting upset at him taking the liberty of doing whatever he
feels like doing. His argument: "it works for me" and "this is the template
that I take from company to company". I told him that he was working for our
company and not another one. I think that he has a lot of nerve to write on
his bill "template" each month and that it works like this (or rather
doesn't work). Of course, there are fancy buttons and yes he loves
VBA. However, my document would not remain attached to his template and then
the styles would collapse until I reattached it, which was every few
minutes. So, not only do I have so much work to do, I also have to deal with
this stupid template of his.
Please forgive me for pouring out my frustration here in so many details and
sorry for venting; I have just been steaming inside and trying to take as
much as I could on myself but I realize that he has to be a lone technical
writer, he has to be able to tell the "others" about the professionalism,
and he has to be able to do things just the way he wants to do them. I am
really ready to let go but can't right now.
On 2/25/08, Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> wrote:
>
> Oops. That should have read "big difference between
> enjoying an easy ride for a little while *and* deciding
> that that reduced contribution is all you're ever going to
> provide."
>
> Gene
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