Christmas is Cancelled

So we’re now in that crazy little valley between a big document publishing push at work and when the documents actually have to be used for work, and the reviews are coming in.

Typically, I hear only the bad news, and there is some if I can say revision=bad news. And revisions are expected. Thusfar, the number of revisions requested is pretty small. Knock on wood.

Still, part of me wants to cancel Christmas.

We’ve been reviewing these documents for months. Some of them for more than six months. It didn’t help that the process we’re documenting evolved over time, with more evolution coming toward the end of the review cycle. Then again, that’s just standard procedure here.

We write. We review. We publish. And then we panic and do it all over again, thankfully on a much more compressed time schedule than the first round, as the major lines in the sand have already been drawn.

Yeah. Just got off the phone. A philosophical change that was made just before the documents were published may be reversed. And that’s nothing unusual. Right now, the scope of the changes is limited to two documents, so that’s not so bad. Holding my breath for more phone calls, though.

I’m not complaining. Dealing with change is part of the job, especially on a new process like the one we’re dealing with. I’m more relieved to have the big document push over and done with, so we can let the dust settle a bit and then figure out where to go from here, rather than have additional change add delay to getting the first round of documents out.

And I do work in the perfect industry to call such change and second-guessing “fallout.”