Help me design a workflow: documentation workflow

In My Humble Opinion
1

I am unfortunately assigned to a horribly dysfunctional team in my day job. It’s come to the point where last Friday I told my manager that I wanted off the team. I told her that I liked her and she is a good manager (true), but my skills are not being utilized on this team and the team is unproductive, so I wanted off of it. She is unfortunately stuck in the same problem, the managers above her don’t see a problem. So she asked me to document the issues, which I’ve done, and we’ll be discussing them and my request over the next week or three.

But I don’t like to be a person who complains without offering solutions, so I would like to come up with something I can propose to her and the management team. I need someone to bounce my ideas off of, and get some details that I haven’t thought of.

In a nutshell, what the team does is author and maintain a collection of documentation. The audience for said documentation is both internal (dev teams) and external (customer’s dev and business teams). The documents were originally drafted by one or two people but without any review or oversight and as a result of many changes over the years, it’s a horrible crappy mess. Management formed the team I’m on two years ago, consisting of new people like myself ostensibly for fresh ideas and perspectives, and two of the original authors. We’ve instituted a process where all changes must go through a “review board” for approval before we can publish them. The review board consists of people with seniority, project team leads, and anyone else who wants to attend to learn of the proposed changes.

That review process sounds pretty reasonable but it’s not working at all. The review board meetings are a clusterfuck. In practice, we have the new people like myself drafting all of the changes and then the seniority people in the meetings rip it to shreds, demand more changes than the original scope called for, have no concern for timely publication, and very much enjoy (they freely admit it) spending lots of time arguing amongst themselves over minutia. Several of the worst actors don’t report to my manager so she seems to be at a loss as to how to fix the mess.

Some thoughts I have for improvement (welcome your feedback):

Send us all to some kind of communication/leadership class? I don’t know if one exists that addresses one of the biggest attitude issues that I see in the seniority and original author people: the attitude that “I wouldn’t have done it that way, therefore it’s wrong”.

A class on constructive criticism? We need to learn how to maintain focus on the scope/goal being asked and not insist on “repainting the Mona Lisa” every meeting. There’s also some subtle kind of passive aggressiveness going on there. The current documents are full of only the simplest examples to illustrate complex processing, and the readers have asked for us to include more examples. What they want is more examples showing the complex and varied processing. The seniority people seem to be throwing that in our faces by insisting that we write multiple examples even for very simple concepts/processing - essentially insisting on multiple examples showing the same thing over and over again. When we question the need for that, they throw that feedback out as justification.

Identify and hire/assign a very strong, loud meeting facilitator to keep the meetings on point. This person should keep the conversation focused, stomp on debate for debate’s sake, stop simultaneous conversations, remind the group about the goals/scope, challenge suggestions that inflate the scope or are unnecessary and work hard to make the meetings productive.

Identify and hire/assign a very organized project manager-type person to keep document changes and reviews moving forward in a timely manner. We have a ton of work coming in and the leisurely/unproductive process means we finish almost nothing. Case in point: last June we had a webinar to propose some document changes to our external customers. They approved of the proposed changes so we said we’d move forward getting them published. Then we had so much other work that we forgot about it for a few months until one of the customers emailed to say “um, what’s the status guys?”. Even then it took us a few months to set up the review meeting because we all had so much other work on our plates. I was the one pestering my team mates to try to move forward and if I hadn’t then we’d have had no forward progress at all.

Any other ideas?

2

This is a very good approach.

This is very bad.

She should be demanding full control and otherwise tendering her resignation.

From what you have written, I’d just fire the senior people. Document review needs to be a constructive process, not a destructive one.

Anyway, how about making it a one-to-one relationship between junior and senior on a round-robin basis? No more meetings. The junior submits the draft to the senior who then helps the junior polish and correct the document. The senior then delivers the completed document to the manager.

3

The senior people report directly to upper managment, above my manager. So they’re not only unmanageable, they’re protected.

I forgot to mention that the end of the process, after the review meeting (if it either succeeds or people lose interest in the fun battle) is to send the document to the C-suite for final approval prior to publication. I can’t honestly see the C-suite letting go of that bit of oversight.

I’ll think about your suggestion to try one on one teams. The goal as it stands is for the newbies like me to spend more of our time doing the writing so that the reviewers don’t spend as much of their time, so that idea may not fly. And the C-suite finds comfort in the idea that many eyeballs have scrutinized what we’ve done. (trust issues) But I’m open to any suggestion at this point.

4

Perhaps that needs to change?

Indeed, but it ought to be your manager that delivers it to them. She’s the person responsible.

5

Ah, okay. And in fact that should fly because our C-suiters and directors are very big on Chain of Command.

6

Your facilitator and PM ideas sound reasonable. Can your current manager fill that role? Can you suggest it to her/him?

7

I have suggested it to her once a few months ago and she either forgot or isn’t able to keep up with the rapid-fire arguing enough to know when things are out of hand. I’m suggesting for that person we need someone who is extremely assertive and organized.

Another idea I’ve come up with is to identify some KPI’s for the team. If you have no goals or quality metrics for the team, no wonder we waste so much time accomplishing nothing!

8

Good one.

Just a thought, but an unpleasant one: have you considered the office politics here? You may end up being put in charge, displacing the current manager.

9

Quit. Today.

That is literally the only fix that will work. You know it. I know it. Many other fine folks here know it. As we’ve told you over and over. As you’ve agreed with over and over.

Until those unmanageable high-seniority / low-skill folks are managed by somebody with the oomph to get them to stop acting like children you’ll go nowhere. As will your company.

And for damn sure you’ll never fix process in an environment where actual deliverable stuff is shelved for *months *because everybody’s too busy working to get any work done.

Ask for a 250% raise and your manager’s manager’s job. If you get it, great. If not, quit. That is literally, not figuratively, the minimum level of change required to begin to make this problem even slightly tractable. Much less soluble. Much less solved.

10

I can respond to both of these at once. I am aware of the office politics and they’re uglier than you can believe. They start at the VP level* and my manager is just as boned by them as I am. She’s a good manager and I told her that my issue isn’t with her. I can’t tell her this, but I think she should also quit for the same reasons I should. My effort to offer a solution is mostly for her benefit.

However, I do have an exit plan for myself. I’m giving the organization a few months and then if it’s not fixed by then I’m job hunting. That timing is mostly because I have an expensive 2-week vacation in June that’s already paid for, nonrefundable. While I have started jobs in the past by immediately going on a pre-planned 1 week vacation, I think 2 weeks is hard to ask of a new employer.

  • The root of the dysfunction is that many people have been with the company for decades and are stuck in their ways. We’ve had a “boom” in hiring new people in the last three years and what we new people are finding (comparing notes, we’ve all seen this) is that while the senior people pay lip service to wanting fresh ideas, in practice they beat us down until we stop offering new ideas. Those senior people are the entirety of the C-suite and VP’s, most of the managers and many bottom-level workers. So yeah, the company is either heading for a revolution or out of business!
11

Companies this dysfunctional don’t get better. This particular problem may get taken care of but some other issue will raise its ugly head. Management doesn’t have good governing principles so any they don’t have a good methods of dealing with issues.

I’ve stated in jobs long after I should have left because I didn’t see that the problems were systemic rather than situational.

12

This should be something taught to every high school student. It took me way too long to learn it too. It’s definitely one of the 10 Commandments for successful employee-ing; it might even be the Prime Directive.

I’m very happy to hear that JcWoman has made her decision. Good luck going forward. As you do get into active job hunt mode it’s real important to really live an “I don’t care” attitude about the current dysfunction. Otherwise that stress will color every contact you have with recruiters, interviewers, etc. And it’s real off-putting to interview a shell-shocked active PTSD sufferer. Don’t be that person.

I eventually spiraled so far down that hole that I was effectively unhirable in that industry. So I changed industries. I’m all better now, but most folks don’t have the luxury of multiple independent career paths.

Good luck.

13

I’m old enough and have been around enough that now it only takes me about 2 years to suss out the systemic dysfunction of a company. Which means that while I used to stay with a company for close to a decade, lately I’m moving on after 2 or 3 years. I also have next to no tolerance for bullshit.

What I really want to know is how to suss things like this out during the interview stage to save myself a lot of trouble. People tell me that good companies are out there but I somehow never find them. For example, my last few jobs had shitty or no project management and I recognized that I work best in environments with moderate process and at least some best practices. When I interviewed here, I asked if they used project management. I was told that they have a PMO. In project management circles that stands for “project management office” and companies that have those use a fairly high level of best practice. So I accepted the job…

… come to find out that here the acronym stands for “product management office” and it’s just three people who make the barest token effort to track estimated hours on projects but nothing more. There is absolutely no actual project management done here.