Re-use story

30Sep08

I can’t recall what prompted this memory to surface, but I thought it would make a nice diversion from my stated theme. It’s about re-use, so it’s somewhat relevant; I’ll leave it to you to judge whether there’s anything valuable to learn from it…

A number of years ago, I was the sole tech pubs contributor for a startup company. For large projects, we had help from a large consulting firm, and so there were plenty of fresh new faces that would serve on 1 or 2 of our projects, then get re-assigned or whatever…

One day I got email from our product manager (I believe his title was VP, this being a startup) with a document that he had received from one of the consultants as part of the project deliverables for a major client. He was excited at the quality of the work, and forwarded it to me as a possible contribution to our product doc. You’ve probably guessed by now that what the consultant delivered was in fact the product doc itself. She had merely taken a section of a larger MSWord document and re-arranged each sub-section, putting the detailed description before the introductory paragraph for each of 20 or so reports that application produced.

I wrote back to the product manager and agreed that he had indeed sent me ‘great stuff’ but that it wouldn’t be much help to me, seeing that I had already written and published it in our regular doc. I also relayed my concern that our partner might be billing for this type of work, which customers probably wouldn’t appreciate.

I got a nice ‘Oops’ email in response, and that was the end of it – like I said, I’ll leave it to readers to infer any lessons; your comments are always welcome…

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