Me again! I want to ask about another problem I have, which is actually a peeve of mine. So I do my best to dig out details with the clients and document them clearly. Then I have my dev team review the document and give me feedback. I'll do that via email if the document is small and straightforward, or I'll send the document out for them to read and set up a meeting to walk through it and discuss it.

What I'm noticing (and have experienced in the past at other companies too) is that after I get the dev team's feedback, get their questions answered and the doc updated, everybody says they're good to go, so I send it to whichever manager needs to approve it. (My current place has a very formal management approval process.) That manager will send it to the dev team AGAIN, not copying me and the dev team sends him questions back. I feel that it makes me look like I'm not doing my job, or as thorough of a job as I should be doing. The manager seems to assume that I'm not letting the dev team review, even though I have told him that I do that.

It also seems like every time someone looks at the docs they think of new questions. That's not horrible, I can see it's human nature that something new occurs to them that they didn't think of the first time. But sometimes it causes the process to drag out when I'm supposed to have things finalized by a certain date.

How do you guys manage this situation? Informing everyone of the deadlines doesn't seem to help. Where I am right now they'll pull the work into the sprint and get started even though I'm chasing down the details they raised and they're not supposed to work on things that aren't approved yet. (We're doing waterfall with sprints... Agilefall or Waterscrum. Whatever you want to call it, but it's NOT Agile.)