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If Laura's getting complaints that commenting on PDFs is too hard,
Confluence is definitely easier for everybody. Sounds like she'd also
have the program manager on her side to push her reports to use it.
If you have uncooperative SMEs and no support from management, you
have a social engineering problem. Again, that program manager would
probably be on your side in changing that.
Inline commenting was introduced just this past February, in
Confluence 5.7. It sounded like Rick was talking about longer ago.
On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 11:26 AM, Rick Lippincott <rjl6955 -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> Robert Lauriston said:
>
>>Confluence's inline commenting, which did not exist when Rick had that
>>unfortunate experience...
>
> Ummm...actually, yeah, inline commenting did exist and that feature
> was what we were using. Back-and-forth discussion, email alerts, the
> whole bit. Yep, that sounds just like what we had.
>
> No, the problem was that the many of the SME's viewed it simply as an
> electronic way to do what they had been doing on paper or PDF:
> lightweight, hurried, and not-too-useful comments. A couple of them
> expressed an aversion to writing out details, because they felt that
> it made them "the writer," and they weren't supposed to be.
>
> Not all. Some were good, some were helpful, but enough failed to
> embrace it (and with absolutely no pressure to do so from management)
> we finally gave up and folded to the SME's demands to circulate a PDF,
> and then have a grand meeting to consolidate all the disparate
> redlined versions.
>
> It's an excellent piece of technology, a great system, and I very much
> wish it had worked for us there. But any technology, if not used
> properly, will prove to be useless.
>
> And it sounds like what Laura is saying is that if the SME's gave
> pushback from commenting on PDFs, there's likely no way they'll go for
> Confluence. I suspect she's right.
>
> --Rick Lippincott
> I Explain Things.
>
> On 7/15/15, Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> wrote:
>> Confluence's inline commenting, which did not exist when Rick had that
>> unfortunate experience, is much easier than commenting on PDFs. It
>> allows back and forth discussion with email alerts when someone
>> responds, pretty much like this discussion here only linked to the
>> relevant portion of the text (much like MS Word comments).
>>
>> It sounds to me like Rick's problems stemmed from trying to do too
>> much at once. You have the advantage of a program manager who knows
>> how it works when it's done right.
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 7:17 AM, Laura Phillips
>> <laurap -at- pluribusnetworks -dot- com> wrote:
>>> Thanks for that input, Rick. Thatâs exactly what I thought would be the
>>> make or break point for using the tool. Since I got pushback that
>>> commenting on PDFs was too hard, I donât think that this is the tool for
>>> us at this time.
>>>
>>> I will put this in my back pocket for use later when the topic comes up
>>> again.
>>>
>>> Thanks everyone, I sure appreciate the feedback.
>>>
>>> Laura
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 7/14/15, 3:31 PM, "Rick Lippincott" <rjl6955 -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>To go back to your original question:
>>>>
>>>>>Since it is collaborative, what is the buy in
>>>>> necessary from the engineering group? Is that crucial to the success or
>>>>> failure of using the tool?
>>>>
>>>>The buy in is significant, and it is critical to the success or failure.
>>>>
>>>>The last place where I worked, we started using Confluence. At first,
>>>>it seemed like a perfect solution, we'd be able to get everyone to be
>>>>able to see each other's comments and the updates could be done
>>>>rapidly.
>>>>
>>>>We never got buy in from the SME's. Many of them whined that they
>>>>couldn't understand how this worked, and the navigation confused them.
>>>>Even those who gave it a try, unfortunately the quality of the
>>>>comments wasn't much improved. Yep, even in Confluence, I was getting
>>>>"This is wrong, fix it" quite a bit. "Can you detail how it needs to
>>>>be fixed?" I'd ask "Oh no, writing it down is your job. Let's have a
>>>>meeting and I'll give you all the details there."
>>>>
>>>>So we gave it up.
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