Question:
I have to deliver something interim and everything’s still up in the air.
Answer: When things are in doubt, use vaguification.
Vaguification
Reply
Category Archives: Problem Lady
The Slack You Cut Others
Question: I have to get sign-off from Safety and Legal before releasing this document, but they aren’t responding to my phone calls and emails. I’m committed to a deadline I can’t meet!
Answer:
You must escalate to management immediately. Include the PM in charge of the project. Don’t try to solve it yourself. Take the long-term view: eventually, EVERYTHING is a self-correcting problem.
How the Fuck Would I Know?
Question: How do I answer intrusive interview questions? They just make my skin crawl.
Answer:
Yeah, interviewers always ask “What gets you out of bed in the morning?” and no one wants to hear you say, “Percocet”.
Einstein Couldn’t Get Hired Here
Question:
How can anyone celebrate genius when no one has time to do any actual thinking? We have so many team meetings that I hardly have time to get my work done, much less think about it.
Answer:
Imagine a company with “genius” branding all over the place. Then, Albert Einstein himself comes in as a candidate for an interview. Maybe he fell through a time warp and still thinks it’s 1945.
The Writing on the Wall
Question: During my last performance review, my manager told me that no one reads my documentation, that it’s just an annoying check box for regulatory compliance. I know people do use it, because they ask me where to find it and sometimes they re-use the content. Am I wasting my time?
Answer:
Yes.
Pop-Up Stakeholders
Question: Who should review my document? Also, how many people?
Answer:
Ideal working doc review team size is 3-5. Anything over 8 will slow you down. Anything less and you’ll miss important things. Continue reading
Sudden Directives
Question: What do I do when people come to me out of the blue with ad-hoc demands? Do I drop everything and do it? Who are these people and how can I tell what’s really important?
Answer:
There’s nothing worse than someone who drops out of the sky, insists that some huge task be completed RIGHT NOW or the world will stop turning, and then the person disappears before you can even ask them what’s going on. They act like they’re the only people in the room that matter and they don’t consider the needs or perspectives of other stakeholders. If you obey their commands, you’ll end up with a very short-lived document or a bunch of un-manageable branches. This way lies perdition. Continue reading
Decision Paralysis
Question: How many drafts do you typically go through, and how do you know when it’s been too many?
Answer:
Ideally, 6 drafts or fewer. In actuality, it’s often 7-12.
The number of drafts doesn’t depend on the length of the doc, either. I’ve had one-page hardware instruction sheets that went through 17 drafts (due to pop-up stakeholders and differences of opinion amongst people who never talked directly to one another).
If things start to cycle with no end, seek a Higher Power, i.e., your management, or someone’s management. “Decision paralysis” usually means that there’s some dysfunction in the team itself or elsewhere in the organization.
If you’re in a lightweight environment where “drafts and versions don’t matter” then maybe approvals don’t matter, either, and you can try saying that while looking for your next job.
Headless Chickens
Question: I just got 2 different directives on the same project from different people, who don’t seem to be aware of one another even though they’re on the same Rapid Development team.
Answer:
This is the “flock of headless chickens” syndrome, and is not your fault.
Committee Can’t Make Decisions
Question: I had a one-hour meeting today with 12 people who all agreed that some compliance standard had to be addressed in the manual, but none of them could tell me how. I read the compliance standard and it’s complete gobbledygook that doesn’t seem to apply at all to the product. I could take a guess and then have them tell me it’s wrong, but what DO I put in the manual?
Answer:
This is what is known as “committee heat death“, a form of entropy. What worked for me was yelling.
Art Before Science 