Technical Writer

Today I was reminded that no matter how professional you may believe you are, no matter how experienced you are, you must never, ever forget your audience.

It was the end of a project. The project files were stored in SharePoint, but in the portal server, rather than on a separate project site. (We set the project up in the early days, when we had no real idea of what we were doing.)

We planned to back down the database to store with the project, but we also decided to copy the really important document libraries down as individual files, and store them with the other project documentation. This was probably overkill, but this is an important project and a couple of extra storage discs was worth the peace of mind.

I don’t know if you have ever tried to restore SharePoint documents from the tables, but they are huge—and for some reason files of the same type in a directory restore to the same size. You can sometimes open a file, save it, and the file size reduces dramatically, so there is some sort of overhead in either the way the files are stored or in the way I download them.

However, I digress. That’s not what this blog is about.

Downloading to the network was slow. It took four to five minutes minimum to save each file. It would take forever. So I downloaded the files to my PC’s c: drive, planning to copy them across to the network later.

The download worked fine, but when I tried to copy the files across to the server I hit the same problem. Each file still took four to five minutes to copy.

So instead I decided to let people access the files from my c: drive. Our developers do it all the time, hopping on to each others machines to check out code.

I made the directory readable, and sent an email to the project managers telling them that I had put the files onto my c: drive, and gave them the name of the PC.

I forgot one thing.

These people were not developers.

They’re like most people. They expect local drives to be just that, local to the PC and inaccessible to everyone else. I gave them my PC number and expected them to know what to do.

I had forgotten my audience.

I had some other work to download for the project. Small stuff, and I had other priorities to complete first. When the project managers asked how I was going, I assumed they meant the small stuff. (Second mistake. Never assume; always make sure you are both talking about the same thing.)

It was a week before I realised what the problem was.

Two weeks out from the end of a project it was precious time to lose.

And all because I assumed my audience knew something they couldn’t possibly have known.