re: How to fend off a Technical writer

[Sean Hower <hokumhome -at- freehomepage -dot- com>]

Carol Anne wrote:
...there was a programmer managerwho would occasionally tell us Business Analysts not to talk to theprogrammers.  Everything had to be channelled through the manager.  So, the three of us B.A.'s would gang up on the manager and fire questions at him. Anywhere.  Anytime.

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Wow, did we work at the same company? As I mentioned in my post about the techwr-l poll, we had been band from talking directly to the programmers. One of the outcomes of this policy was that we had to go through the programmer manager.....who tended to run away every time he saw us. He turned around and ducked into the bathroom one time while we were just walking down the hall on our way to lunch!

The funny thing that I notice about your situation and mine is that information managed to flow dispite efforts by management to stop it. That information flow was based on personal relationships that we established with the developers. Because those relationships were unofficial, they were necessarily covert. Times spent "hanging out" were times spent trading information and discussing the product.

I recently read a paper about ethnography being used to uncover the processes that Xerox's on-site service personnel followed. The situation there was that the training and documentation given to the service personnel was not thorough enough. The ethnographer found that the service personnel relied on personal relationships with other service personnnel and lunch-time chats to bring each other up to speed, talk about recent cases, and to discover solutions to difficult cases in group brain-storming sessions.

With my background in anthropology and ethnography, I really find these sorts of "covert" relationships interesting. They represent almost a subversive practice, that runs against company policy, in order to produce the types of results that the company wants. It puts corporate policy on one level, and personal relationships on another, forcing the two to work against each other instead of cooperating. In my situation, management finally conceded to the interaction the technical writers secretly established with the programmers because they saw the value in it.

Both my experience and Carol Anne's experience really point to the need to establish a good personal relationship with SMEs. How you go about that will vary from person to person, but if that relationship exists, things run more smoothly. :-)


********************************************
Sean Hower

technical writer
http://hokum.freehomepage.com

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