Xrefs, Meet Your New Manager

An hour or so before our regular team meeting, our manager-to-be came to see me at my desk. She’d spent three hours researching cross references versus hyperlinks in our Flare projects, and she was stopping by to let me know that she disagreed with my assessment that we should use both. She didn’t want her opinion to be a surprise to me in the meeting when it came time to vote on our latest debate:  whether to switch all of our hyperlinks to cross-references. I’d spent some time putting together a handout for the other folks on our team to compare our options, and I’d also made a case for using both so that we could still use links that didn’t refer to topic headings.

 

Manager-to-be sat down and explained to me why she though we should replace all of the hyperlinks, and we discussed some examples of how content could be reworked to accommodate the change. After our conversation, I’m confident that the specific how-tos of applying this change to our thousands of legacy topics will be covered for our less enthusiastic Flare-adopters, because I can tell that she considered that.

 

 

I do not want to be the person whose feelings have to be tip-toed around and massaged, nor am I in a position at our company where it is my job to monitor team morale. I keep that weather-vane up for pragmatic purposes, not altruistic ones. Is this solution I’m proposing good for everybody or just good for me? If it’s just good for me, it can’t be a department standard, and I want my projects to follow the standards. I want to know if I’m wasting my time, too—is someone already working on a solution that seems more promising? As our tasks get increasingly technical with the advent of Flare, good communication on our team can keep us from duplicating efforts or traveling too far down the wrong roads. Plus, let’s just say the farmer in me wants to know which way the wind is blowing. If it’s looking like sunny skies, I am perfectly happy to keep my eye on the row I’m hoeing. And I won’t need my back scratched while I’m doing it.

 

 

That said, what is up with the cross-references, already? Some of you may have seen my ongoing Twitter posts about whether to go 100% xref and wondered what the fuss is about. Our department is even going to vote on it, for Pete’s sake. But this decision embodies all of the elements that have tripped us up during our implementation of Flare: variations in formatting across projects, team members being at varying stages of development across projects, inexperience with help-authoring, and difficulty setting standards when our technical knowledge is still growing. The voting thing is management’s attempt to get a grip on the amoebic nature of our Flare standards.

 

 

Then we learned this week that in addition to our team lead, we will now have a Tech Comm manager; one with experience with the issues we’re encountering. She’ll have the authority and the know-how to take those issues to the management table, if need be, and speak about them like a tech writer. From what I’ve seen, she’s also professional, open, and respectful. The skies are indeed looking sunny.