RE: Antwort: Re: Responsibility, blame, managers, and getting the job done

[MList -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com]

> But, if management has not been positively encouraging 
> cooperation or has infact
> been working against it where do you stand? 

First, I'd hope that I hadn't been giving cause...

Second, I'd request, in writing, that the particular management 
person say what they meant, in writing. Most likely, I'd sum 
up my understanding in a memo/e-mail and ask "Is this your 
understanding of the situation? Please clarify."

If they were being deliberately obstructive or condoning non-
cooperation), then I'd bury them in specific requests for 
information.  I'd make it a special point to highlight aspects 
of the specs that had changed (but not been yet recorded) or or 
the developing product that were not according to spec, and 
I'd show just a couple of samples from my customer documents 
that would be different depending upon the answer -- with the 
stated or unstated implication that there were plenty more.

If that wasn't giving results, then I might recruit other 
stake-holders, like the Customer Support people who would 
inevitably have to take up the slack, or the Marketing and 
Sales people who would have a tougher job if the product 
documents began to get a bad rep.

If all that wasn't sufficient, then I might bump the problem 
upstairs, with a nice recorded history to back me up.

But then, that would be a very different environment than 
I'm working in now, so another environmental factor might 
be very different as well -- that is, I might face reluctant, 
close-mouthed developers, but have the compensation of actually 
having nearly-final, working product from which to create 
documents.  As it is, I work with a great bunch of people, who 
are endlessly patient (even if I'm not bringing homebaked treats), 
and so I'm working a great deal from their input, and only using a 
product sample to verify and clean up, near/at the end of the 
release cycle.

/kevin

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