ITauthor

I've often heard technical writers say: "I'd have liked to have had a few more weeks on it. There's some information I didn't manage to get in there and there are parts that I would have like to have restructured ... and some of the input forms got changed at the last moment and I really should have redone the screenshots, and those diagrams were just intended to be Visio roughs, I meant to do a final version in Illustrator ... and really it could probably do with one last round of reviews ..."

OK, to be honest, that's me. That's usually what I'm saying - or at least thinking - when it's time to ship the product to customers. And I've always told myself the reason I'm like that is because I'm a perfectionist and the reason I find it difficult to wrap something up - and say "It's good enough. Customers will get more value from getting this documentation now than from waiting a couple of weeks and getting it late" - is because I have such high standards. Turns out I'm probably kidding myself.

The lizard brain

In this video Seth Godin (author of Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?) explains why the resistance to shipping (and by shipping I mean getting stuff finished and despatched/published/released) is just another symptom of our lizard brain at work.

Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain on Vimeo

Thrash early

Another concept Seth Godin raises in his presentation is one of Steve McConnell's: thrash early. "Thrash at the beginning because thrashing at the beginning is cheap." In this context, "thrashing" means working without making any progress. The expression was coined, I believe, by Frederick Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month where he described great beasts, long since extinct, that had strayed into a tar pit, thrashing about with all their might but not making any progress to escape their predicament.

In the following diagram McConnell illustrates the situation where a lack of process and planning at the start of a project results in an increase in thrashing, and a decrease in coding progress, the longer you spend on a project.

Diagram from Steve McConnell, Professional Software Development.

When a project has paid too little early attention to the processes it will use, by the end of a project developers feel they are spending all of their time in meetings and correcting defects and little or no time extending the software. They know the project is thrashing. When developers see they are not meeting their deadlines, their survival impulses kick in and they retreat to "solo development mode"—focusing exclusively on their personal deadlines. They withdraw from interactions with managers, customers, testers, technical writers, and the rest of the development team. Project coordination unravels.

Steve McConnell, "The Power of Process", IEEE Computer, May 1998