TheBanyanTree: Getting Descriptive

[trebro at att.net]

A few months ago, my immediate boss (who had been demoted) left for greener pastures, leaving me to take care of most of the things he did on a daily basis.  This was okay with me;  I coveted his position when they put him in it and gave him a boss rather than put me in it and give *me* a subordinate.

(That sounds rather ruthless.  I should explain that his plan was to promote me, and get me an assistant.  Instead, they demoted him and gave *him* a new boss.  So while I did in fact want his job, it was not because I disliked him in any way.)

I am basically doing his job now, in addition to my old duties.  I am hopeful of getting the official promotion soon, but I refuse to say it's mine until I see the paperwork.  You see, I'm in Human Resources, so I know a thing or two about job placement and hiring. ;)

At first, this situation--me as about 1.75 people--seemed rather impossible to maintain.  However, the more I do the work, the more I see that, with just about 6-10 more hours in a week than I was doing previously, I can do both jobs.  One of the reasons is that under the system my boss and I had put together, because he required final sign-off and checking no matter how much he trusted me, there was a lot of double-work and time lags.  Those are gone now, because I can double-check myself at the time I am doing the work in the first place.  That saves me a lot of time.  The other is that he wasn't very happy towards the end, and I think it was affecting how much he did in a given day.  I don't blame him at all, but it meant I was doing a lot more work anyway, even before he left.

I tell all this to tell you about my latest project--making job descriptions.  For a company that's been around since 1987, we are woefully inept at having job descriptions.  People just sort of do their thing, learning from their managers and co-workers what's expected of them.  It's an okay way of doing things, but neither our corporate parent, my boss, or myself like that.

So, here goes the English Major doing technical writing.  And to think I used to tell people that I don't use my degree!  

I never imagined myself as a technical writer.  This is about 2,000 miles away on the job spectrum from what I pictured myself doing four years ago.  I never thought I'd be not only working "for the man" but as the embodyment of "the man" himself.  It's an odd feeling.

But I like doing these job descriptions.  Setting up a person's tasks in such a way that they are clearly defined and subject to change is pretty cool.  I get to talk about things like scope--the plot of the description!--and requirements and, best of all, I get to tell people as high as the Vice Presidents what they're supposed to be doing on a daily basis!  Not bad for a guy who had no idea what to do after graduation, eh?

Sometimes I have a model to work from.  Othertimes, like the one I'm just starting, there's nothing to go on but a few notes.  Those are the most challenging, but they also give me free reign to set them up as I see fit, usually in coordination with the manager of the job.

I haven't been doing as much creative writing as I used to, but at least I still get to create, and best of all, get paid for it, too.  I'd like to get back to my fiction--I have a nifty thriller I was working on at the beginning of the year--but maybe this change of pace is just what I needed.

-Rob
http://www.livejournal.com/users/trebro