(Nods...) Somewhere I stumbled upon an article on: How to give requirements to a programming team. It was written specifically for upper management folks in non-computer related areas of an organization. And one of the cautionary tales given was, basically, how not to be a “her.”
Outside of the immediate domain of computer hacking, the process of creating computer software is poorly understood, just as much as it is business-critical and extremely expensive. Many folks in “her” position have realized ex post facto that they unintentionally caused a serious over-run by what they innocently said in an e-mail ... never intending to have done such a thing, but with incomplete understanding of what might happen next in the down-stream authority chains. (I remember that the article also referred to the classic “whisper a message into the ear of the person next to you, and so-on around the room” communication problem. And, perhaps slightly irreverently, “at the top of Mount Sinai, God was ‘merely talking to’ his good friend, Moses. But that’s not how it looked from the valley floor.”)
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