disagreement on overrides

[Combs, Richard]

Milan Davidovic wrote:

> The way I've been "brought up" as a Frame user was to avoid overrides
> wherever possible. I'm now working with a writer who is much more
> liberal about overrides than I am. We currently work only on
> unstructured Frame documents; output is PDF (to print from or for use
> onscreen). Right now, we're the only two writers working on the doc
> set in question.
> 
> Have any of you been on either side of such a difference in approach,
> and how did you go about resolving it?

First question: Who's in charge? 

There are many good reasons for adhering to a template. But the first
thing to determine is whether you (a) are empowered to _tell_ the other
writer not to deviate from the template, (b) must _persuade_ the other
writer, or (c) must appeal this issue to a third person. 

Second question: Who owns the template? 

The template owner should look at the kinds of overrides the other
writer is applying and determine if some of them result from an outage
in the template or from a failure of the writer to understand how to use
it. 

Third question: How important is this to you and to the company? 

If you're in charge, of course, it doesn't have to be all that
important. You say, "This is how I want you to do things," and that's
that. A preference is all you need. If it's someone else, how hard are
you willing to work to win the decision-maker over to your way of doing
things?

Also, you have to consider where the company is in its life cycle, and
how long these docs are likely to be around (because overrides are less
important in short-lived, throwaway docs, and much more of a pain in
docs that will see lots of revisions and maintenance). You may decide
it's not worth fighting over, or you may decide that now's the time to
draw the line in the sand.

Personally, I wouldn't be happy for long in a situation such as you
describe. If my carefully crafted templates were routinely disregarded
and overridden, and there was nothing I could do about it, I'd have to
make some kind of change -- different project, co-worker, or company. 

But that's me. YMMV.

Richard


Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
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rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-777-0436
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