2 pieces . . .

Clicking around on our server, I can see mgmt’s point about quickly uploading standards and decisions so they don’t get forgotten, and then later, rehashed. I wince to hear the phrase ‘carved in stone,’  but the fact is we’ve got an bewildering array of locations for recording Flare progress.

We’ve got a standards meeting document with an agenda for our upcoming meeting, plus all the decisions made at each meeting, plus an old table of tasks that has fallen into disuse. This document is six pages long.

In a separate document, we’ve got our WIP Flare Integration Guide–which I stubbornly call our implementation guide–which contains all of of our draft (or at least that’s how I think of them) procedures for company-specific Flare tasks.

In yet another document, we have staff meeting notes, which frequently contain Flare decisions.

There are CSS notes in the Tech Comm master Flare project. There are Word documents in the outer folders of this project, plus the beginnings of a file path that will allow us to grab common files from this master project for each new project.

This is all separate from our legacy desk reference and proposed folder of How-tos, waiting to be voted up or down for inclusion. Perhaps we should work on this. I guess it would go a long way towards improving our consistency issue.

 

I posted the outline of my STC presentation. Aside from agreement expressed by a couple of teammates, I received some mildly dissenting bits from our CSS guy. The most interesting one was his assertion that one of our challenges was inconsistent use of our Word template in legacy documents. I had considered our adherence to this template to be one of the things we had going for us. You could pick up any manual and find the menu option and procedure you wanted, or determine that it wasn’t there. All variations were run by the team and debated.

But they were still variations.

He also noted his frustration with all the obscure styles that were retained in or added to the latest version of the template because one or two people used them. And then there he was with 60-odd styles to format for online and print.

Then there those in-line fixes for styles that couldn’t keep up with my improved design. There were only two on my part, but multiply that by all the other smarties on our team, and it adds up.

 

Somebody is going to move my cheese, I can just sense it.