Damage control

[geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA]

 Tina Nevin asked for help in rescuing a floundering
 project. Tina, even if you're leaving the company
 permanently, there's no reason why you can't continue to
 work on the project freelance via e-mail. Remind your boss
 that all deadlines other than medical ones are flexible,
 and unless they want to ship the document without help,
 they'll probably have to extend this deadline.

 We need more details too about the actual problem. You said
 originally that the contractor writes very well, but for
 the current project, his help structure and formatting are
 poor. If I connect the dots, this tells me that the
 hypertext and layout are the problems, not the writing
 itself. True? If so, then you're not in as much trouble as
 you thought. The most important part of any help project,
 bar none, is the clarity and intelligence of the writing.
 Formatting is something you can mostly worry about once the
 text is complete, and it's often more efficient and
 consistent to take a final pass through the completed text
 to apply the formatting. (I'm assuming that you mean
 trivial stuff like boldface, quotation marks, and page
 breaks; if the guy has used random paragraph styles, you've
 got more of a problem on your hands.)

 Disorganized hyperlinks fall somewhere in between in terms
 of importance: you can use good text with poor links, but
 good links are useless if the text is gibberish. When I
 write, I usually plan the main hyperlinks in advance, build
 them into the document structure as I go, then fill in the
 gaps and verify the structure while I do my final editing
 and proofreading. That approach should probably work for
 you too. If the current links are unsalvageable, delete
 them all and start from scratch. That will be an awful lot
 faster than trying to fix what you've already got.

 From what you've said and left unsaid, it sounds like the
 contractor took on too much work at once... he's trying to
 simultaneously juggle the three tasks of text,
 graphics/format, and hyperlinking all at once, and ends up
 by dropping all three balls. Personally, I find it easiest
 to treat these as separate tasks, handled at different
 times, since each one uses a different mode of thinking. My
 suggestion: put him to work on one thing at a time and
 ***make sure he completes that task before moving on to the
 next***. I'd recommend getting the text in shape first,
 then rebuilding the hyperlinks, and concluding (if time
 permits) with the formatting.

 --Geoff Hart     @8^{)}     geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
 Disclaimer: Speaking for myself, not FERIC.

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