With the full knowledge that my longevity with this company was severely limited, I put on my consultant hat. What, after all, did I have to lose? I would be out situation hunting before I knew it. So I talked and talked. Fortunately, I had a champion who was a full time employee. She foresaw the opportunity for herself to campaign on behalf of this budding program. And she did, relentlessly I might add. I fed her what she required to sell the need to her leadership team. Turns out she was highly influential.
I want to stop here for just a moment and point out that I could have made other choices. I could have seen the need and just let it go. After all, this company had been in business longer than I’d been alive, was set in their ways and comfortable with how they had been doing things. My colleague and I were certainly disruptive forces in this continuum. I also could have adopted the notion, I alone could fix it and do it three months. I have had that attitude in the past and it only did damage – both to me and stifled projects I’ve worked on.
Needless to say, I did not make those other choices. I teamed up with my colleague and we influenced others to join forces with us and started, if you will, a movement toward getting this program under way supported by the leadership team. No, we did not accomplish this in my three remaining months as my contract was extended. Our small team continued to demonstrate the effectiveness having a localized program both by having well-written procedures and an organized way in which to make them accessible.
In addition, we demonstrated how much more effective it was to train people with documentation than without. Proving along the way that having more localized control over what we produced was serving us better than having everything in a manual most of the staff only vaguely had knowledge. Together we continued to demonstrate the effectiveness of the foundation we were building for the department. And it was a good thing we did because over my tenure that team it grew exponentially.
About the time we had established our fledgling program with some really basic tools (Word, Adobe PDFs and SharePoint), the company decided to replace the computerized tracking tool with which the department was used to using. They replaced a Windows based tool customized to fit the way in which the team did their work with a more industry standard tool that looked to be out of the distant past with its black and green screens. This “new” system demanded not only that the staff learn the tool but also to conform its business procedures to the way in which it needed data. Trust me when I say that this not only caused resistance with the current staff, it also raised the ire with long-time employees who were involved with creating that Windows based system.
Luckily we had our fledging technical communications program in place with this foundation and that positioned our group to be involved in training the ever-expanding department to use the “new” computer system, train them in the new business processes they would need to use and support them while they made those changes. And no, this wasn’t accomplished before my contract was due to expire either, so my contract continued to be extended as I was assigned to the training team. And my point is, none of this could have been preordained (at least at my level) at the outset of my tenure with this company and that procedure I was asked to write several years back.
Sometimes it seems like circumstances come together in ways we don’t understand and are outside of our hands. But I say, if you have any experience in this profession at all, developing a program like this organically can be not only exciting and fun, it can be a testament to all the principles you’ve been reading about and practicing in this profession. So don’t be afraid to explore the insights you have; be courageous and speak what you know in the face of what might be no agreement. It will serve you in the long run and those you are serving.