I’ve spent a great many hours this week reviewing documents for the project that I’m managing. Whilst I understand the technology and the way all the various components of our application fit together, I don’t profess to fully understand the content; that’s not my job.
In a nutshell I need to make sure that anything that leaves my desk doesn’t come back from the customer with spelling, grammar or formatting issues. Simple right? Far from it.
An experienced Project Manager has written and read many documents. An experienced Project Manager knows what business writing is, and will make sure that formal documents are written in such a manner. An experienced Project Manager does this by using their experience. That’s part of the value we add (along side heading off problems and dealing with customer salvos - topic for another time maybe).
Easy things that bug me about docuemnts that I have to review are sloppy spelling, punctuation and grammar. In most cases some of the simple problems can be easily resolved by a run through with the spell checker - believe me, this is the first thing your customer will do. Harder to find things are the words that are spelt correctly, but are used in totally the wrong context (ever come across the word “manger” in place of “manager”??).
Another time consuming problem is Styles in Word. If you don’t understand Styles, then ask else DON’T USE THEM!! When you have a 200 page document with Styles all up the wazoo, its going to take someone the best part of a day to re-format the document. This is a waste of effort and subsequently money.
You might ask why the customer would care about Styles? Some might not, but if your document has a Contents Page, or makes use of referencing, a simple Update of these fields will reveal all sorts of gremlins.
If in doubt - don’t use Styles, but do ask your Project Manager for a lesson on them; I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to oblige.
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I find that a lot of people have no idea what they are stuffing up when they use Word. You would not believe just how much time can be wasted because someone was trying to do something silly to make something look flash.
I totally agree Brendan. By the looks of things you’re probably in a better position to comment on this problem than I am going by the purpose of Through The Haze. Actually the confidence that Word gives many users (false though it may be) causes more problems long term than it solves. I’ve been thinking of writing a weekly how to; I’m sure it would get a following.
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