Yesterday, I went for a walk with a co-worker. She works in a different department and I don't know her all that well, but we have history. When I worked at Quintrex, from 1998 - 2010, there was a project to convert legacy OfficeVision documents to MS Word. I don't remember exactly what steps I took to follow to have it happen, but eventually, she was hired by Quintrex as a contractor to help me with the conversion. After that project was over, I wasn't in touch with her. Then, when I started here nearly two years ago, I happened to see her last name on a food item in the common refrigerator. Eventually, I found where she sat and then, one day, I stopped at her cubicle to ask her if she had worked a contract at Quintrex many years ago - she was. Fast forward to yesterday, and I happened to be walking laps in the training area of my level when she came out of a classroom. We struck up a conversation about work. I found myself telling her the story of how, at Pearson, I was one of the negative people. Initially, I didn't agree with authoring in Word & distributing PDFs to authoring in Confluence. I was late to the party, if you will. Then, when I was at the party, I bought into the concept of snippets so that I only had to write text one time. I didn't want to write the same content on multiple pages and then have to remember what pages had to be updated. That was what had happened with the user guides in Word. When there were 10+ user guides to update with the same text, it felt like an enormous waste of my time. Thus, I went 'all in' when it came to snippets. I wanted to make our workflow lean and efficient and since there would be those 10+ customers using the single Confluence site, I wanted to be consistent across all pages.
Frankly, that led to me stating my minority case to the majority in the department and being overruled. Repeatedly. Now I'm not mad about what I went through because by making my case, I had to use logical reasoning skills which I have worked on as one of my personal weaknesses. I wanted to convince the majority of some simple truths about single sourcing content and snippets, but ultimately, it just didn't happen. I still am passionate about snippets and use them now, in my disaster recovery documentation. I have a Word document - named "DRMStandards.docx" that stores the standard headings I want to use in all of my linked Word documents. I store each heading as a bookmark. Then, in my linked Word documents, there are references to the bookmarks in the DRMStandards.docx file. If I would want to change a standard heading, I update the heading in DRMStandards.docx, refresh all the other Word documents (which I do by deleting the HTML files that RoboHelp automatically creates for each of the Word documents), and all of those linked Word documents then have the updated heading. It's really slick and works well for my purposes.
Thus, it was in that frame of mind that I brought to this article about disagreeing at work (link below). To be crystal clear, I enjoyed my time at Pearson and I don't regret any of the days I spent there. I enjoyed working on the team I worked on as well as working for my manager. I have no ill will whatsoever. The above words are meant to describe my perspective after nearly two years of not working at Pearson on a daily basis.
Why We Should Be Disagreeing More at Work; Author: Amy Gallo; Published on: January 03, 2018
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