John Limon

The team will go through the various stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Be prepared to address these stages with the team. Acknowledge that a traumatic event has happened. Continue to show empathy and clarity of purpose as you move forward. Each member will deal with each stage differently. As team leader, be there for your team. Those that were layed off already had a decision made for them. Help your team make the right decisions going forward. Yes, this is heartbreaking especially when saying goodbye to those with whom you've become close. A layoff is just as hard for those left behind. But the work must continue. As team lead, influence how well your team will move on from this event.

An added challenge when planning your document structure is the target medium used for publishing. Before, the end product was very predictable: a sheet of paper, or a screen that emulates a sheet of paper. The dimensions are very familiar so page design is easy to optimize. With today's delivery choices, defining an effective structure becomes more of a challenge. Information will still use the constructs of a sheet of paper but will now also include screens of varying dimensions, resolutions, and other capabilities. Information must now be structured to deliver on anything that can display text, tables, images, play multimedia elements, support interactivity, all the while being connected to networks. It's an exciting time to be a TW.

Understand what is or is not working with your current process. What are you trying to fix? What is working that you are intending to keep? What approach are you currently following? Waterfall? Lean/Six Sigma? XP? Crystal? Standard DevOps/SDLC? Agile has an attractive aura that can draw in participants just by its marketing. Agile methodologies may demand more than your company culture, philosophy, budgets, or development needs can afford. Regardless, a close examination of Agile can yield new ideas and approaches you can borrow and apply to your current method without necessarily fully adopting it.

The question focuses on the wrong aspect of a review. Any conflicts should already have been identified and resolved before this time. A performance review is one of the worst places to reveal or discover a conflict exists. The performance review should be a summary of accomplishments and not a conflict resolution session. If this is the case, either you or your boss did a poor job communicating throughout the year. You and your boss need to fix this, for both your sakes.

It's easy to answer the siren's call of technology filled with chat apps, video meetings, shared screens, DMs. etc. These are great tools and leverages what is often already installed in our work environment. But let's not forget the most basic tool of them all: the telephone, or the "smartphone." Call your teammate. It's ironic that such an old technology that is a phone call could still be so effective. A call has less "cognitive load." No worrying about cameras, where to look, how you look, muted mics, blurred backgrounds, spotty internet, arcane settings. You are using proven tech that's over 100 years old. Sure, there's a place for the newest and latest: Teams, Slack, WebEx, G-Meet, Zoom. The point is ABC: Always Be Communicatin'.

With writing being such a personalized task, differences in style will be inevitable among different authors. In technical writing, this is mitigated through application of various industry accepted style guides: CMOS, MS, APA, etc. Regardless of the standard, there are two attributes to consider to keep the writing style consistent. 1. Enforcement of standards. This is an external component and if applied incorrectly will be detrimental to the product and the group. Enforcement should be thought of as oversight, or editorial compliance through reviews. 2. A sense of mission to serve the reader. This is an internal value that all authors on the project must already have accepted and embodied into their workflow. The reader is king!