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Collaboration and Accountability: meeting the deadline monster head-on

Recently, I witnessed the usual panic, stress, and overtime requests as the deadline for publishing a product catalog approached. With less than 2 days to go, the catalog was nowhere near complete; parts numbers for many items were as yet unknown, and pricing for many others had not been communicated, or was unconfirmed. The hapless tech writer assigned the task of getting the catalog ready for print had just spent the better part of a day on the telephone and whipping off emails to try and chase down the missing information before print deadline. As we talked about it at the end of her already long day she confessed that she felt run-down. Nevertheless, she was determined to get a bite to eat, and work through the evening, as well.

As I commiserated with her about the sorry state of affairs, I was reminded of my own struggles with getting information and review materials back from my authors, when I was a tech pubs manager for a defense research institute ... and I told her this story: I had been hired as the publications manager with the mandate to bring throughput times for reports and publications down from over 6 months to 6 weeks average. In fact, if I managed to do that within the first year, I would receive a considerable bonus. By the 10th month, I was very close. All the divisions that produced scientific reports were now within the 6-week publication window—but one. One division was still so tardy getting the review copies back to my group, that they were single-handedly skewing my averages, and keeping me away from the 6-week mark ... and my considerable bonus. Pleading, threatening, sweet-talking, tough-talking ... nothing seemed to help. So I came up with a plan. I discussed the plan with my director, who agreed to back up my story, although we both knew I wouldn’t go through with it. Here’s what I did:

I wrote an official memo to the offending division’s director, and copied his senior research managers on it. In the memo, I announced a new policy: If a report sent out for review had not returned within 14 days, the assumption would be that there were no substantative edits, and we would finalize the copy editing and publish the report as-is. Sure enough, a tremendous hue-and-cry followed, but true to his word, my boss backed me up. The division’s director and senior managers—knowing that incomplete or incorrect reports would seriously damage their reputations—subsequently leaned hard on their staff, and within one month, I had all outstanding reports back, and from then on never had to wait longer than a week for a review copy to be returned with edits.  Was this manipulative? Perhaps, but it was also a last ditch attempt to place responsibility and accountability where it belonged.  Accountability, or lack thereof. That is the real point of my story.

Let’s go back to the tech writer stuck with chasing down information 2 days before print deadline, and look at her situation through the lens of accountability. And let’s ask the following questions:
1. Who is responsible for delivering product information in a timely fashion?
2. Who stands to lose (face, credibility, reputation) if the catalog is published with errors and omissions?
3. Who should be held accountable if the catalog is not published on time, or is published with errors and omissions?

In the traditional world of technical communications, we may know who’s responsible, but we also know who often as not gets blamed: the tech docs department. In my opinion, this is the result of a traditional mind-set, where the tech docs department “serves” the other departments—in this case Sales and Product Management.

The correct answers are, of course:
1. Sales and Product Management
2. Sales and Product Management
3. Sales and Product Management

The situation described above may be unique to this one organization—perhaps they are more dysfunctional than others. But unless the providers of information are held accountable for incorrect or missing information, there is no incentive to pro-actively, by their own initiative, provide the information in a timely way. Because the production of this catalog takes place in a linear process—and the tech docs department sits at the very end of that process—they are automatically assumed to be responsible for completion—whatever it takes. That many tech docs departments accept this, is a bit of a mystery to me.

To appreciate how bizarre this truly is, compare it to the situation where the chef in a fine restaurant is preparing the main course for a table of 8 diners; while doing so, finds all kinds of ingredients missing, and has to send out his line cooks to a butcher to buy the steaks, or run to the grocery store to get a bunch of parsley. Under these circumstances, it’s pretty clear that the guests will probably not receive their meals on time ... Obviously, the general or purchasing manager didn’t order the ingredients, and will in all likelihood get fired. Or at the very least yelled at.

Migrating to a Content Management system, will do more than speed things up; it will also quite ruthlessly expose where the production schedule accountability breaks down: no information object can be checked back in to the repository without approval or rejection. The system will also be able to churn out an overview of all information objects still under review, and it will clearly indicate who is responsible and should be held accountable for the review. No hiding the elephant in the room anymore.

In a more collaborative future state, where product managers, product analysts, sales managers and technical writers work collaboratively on the catalog project, there will hopefully no longer be a need to ‘name and shame’ the tardy ones. All participants are equally responsible for the end result, and all are held accountable if the result is incomplete or incorrect. That collaborative state, however, may not ever come about without the back-up enforcement capabilities of a CMS.
Collaboration is not just a way of working; it is a state of mind; so minds must change. 

Last updated on Oct 18, 2007 at 12:50 PM
Category: Content Management Managing Up Human Performance Improvement
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