Lessons Learned
By: Bonnie Denham
I’ll never forget that phone call.
I received it while I was in a meeting. It has shaped the way I manage documents in my role as a Technical Editor ever since, even after changing companies.
“Bonnie, where is the completion program?!”
Me: “What do you mean ‘where is it?’”
“It’s not on the server! It’s gone!”
That completion program was supposed to go to print in just three short days before being shipped offshore to a rig that would be waiting. I quickly clicked my way to the location on the server where I knew the procedure sections should be. The panicked voice on the other end of the phone was right; it was gone. I checked other nearby folders to see if it had accidentally gotten dragged somewhere else. No luck. We called IT – it would take at least a week to try to recover it.
Even in those days before SharePoint I didn’t trust “the server.” I had a copy of the procedure sections for that completion program saved to my hard drive, but, it was three days old. Nonetheless, that’s what the team started from. We worked tirelessly to not only remember and re-do the work from the past three days, but to also finish the program.
