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I agree with Richard - they want to TELL you their changes, and also they
want to be visible, as Victoria mentioned.
Meetings do help, but I also take apart the book and distribute small
sections to the engineers responsible for each unit. I usually get the
feedback I need, and if not, I pester them a couple of times until they come
through. There's no rationale for making people feel guilty about being
really busy, so a sense of humor helps too.
But I realize that it's not always practical to divide up the book. It just
works in my startup environment because everyone knows who's responsible for
each piece.
Bee
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:18 AM, Victoria Wroblewski <
victoria -dot- wroblewski -at- eagletest -dot- com> wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Downing, David
> Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2008 12:33 PM
> To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Subject: Review meetings vs. distributing copies
>
> Over the past several years, I have noticed a phenomenon connected with
> the age-old problem of getting technical reviews from SMEs. If I just
> distribute copies of a document, either hardcopy or electronic via
> email, and ask for comments back, I always get nada or almost nada. If I
> call a review meeting, people will accept the meeting invitation and
> come to the meeting. In fact, I just had the same group of people accept
> a meeting invite who had hitherto not been giving me any feedback when I
> just sent them copies of the document through email.
>
> The question is -- why does this happen?
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> In places where I've seen the night & day shift when going from
> distributed copies to review meetings, it's been one of two things...
>
> 1 - Very busy engineers who are always putting out new fires, and even
> when they try to put time aside to review docs, they get interrupted.
> When there is a set meeting, they can go to the meeting and give 100%
> focus (until someone pulls them out to put out an inferno of an issue).
>
> 2 - If it's a place where the documentation is so low on the totem pole
> of priorities that it's underground, meetings provide a very visible
> example of who is not contributing as they should. You don't want to be
> the one person/group that is not represented at that meeting, do you?
> Everyone else in the room will be able to tell you're the person/group
> is holding things up, just by seeing you're not there.
>
> - V
>
>
>
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