So, about this ‘lee paige’ thing. It wasn’t exactly a tech stack or anything fancy like that. It actually started when this consultant, yeah, named Lee Paige, came into our place a while back. This was maybe two, three years ago? Time flies.
First Impressions
Right off the bat, Paige had this whole new way of supposedly ‘streamlining’ our project documentation. Sounded good on paper, you know? Less redundant paperwork, more ‘actionable insights’. That was the buzzword bingo for the week. We were all drowning in documentation nobody ever read, so the idea wasn’t totally unwelcome. But the way Paige presented it… it felt a bit off. Too slick, maybe? Like selling snake oil.
Trying It Out
Anyway, management bought into it, hook, line, and sinker. So, we had to give it a shot on the next small project. My team got volunteered, lucky us. The core idea, as I understood it from Paige’s many, many PowerPoint slides, was this:
- Forget detailed specs upfront.
- Use ‘living documents’ – basically wikis that anyone could change anytime.
- Focus documentation only on ‘blockers’ and ‘key decisions’.
- Hold daily ‘alignment syncs’ instead of weekly status reports.
So, I started setting things up. Ditched our usual templates. Fired up a new section in our internal wiki. Told the team, “Okay folks, we’re doing the Lee Paige shuffle now.” First week was chaos. The daily syncs just turned into rambling complaint sessions because nobody knew what anyone else was actually doing. The ‘living documents’? Yeah, they lived alright. Changed every five minutes. One guy would document a decision, another would overwrite it an hour later because they had a ‘better idea’.
The Grind
I spent more time trying to figure out the current state of the wiki than actually coding or managing tasks. We tried putting some controls in place, like maybe only leads could approve changes. But that just bottlenecked everything and went against Paige’s ‘everyone owns the docs’ mantra. We tried to define ‘blockers’ and ‘key decisions’ clearly. Turns out, what’s a key decision to one person is just Tuesday afternoon noise to another.
The biggest headache? When something went wrong, which it always does, figuring out why was a nightmare. There was no stable spec to refer back to, just a messy history of wiki edits and vague ‘alignment sync’ notes. It felt like building a house on shifting sand.
What Happened in the End
After about two months of this madness on that project, we hit a major roadblock. Two parts of the system just wouldn’t talk to each other correctly. Why? Because the teams working on them had based their work on two different versions of a ‘key decision’ documented in the wiki on the same day! Took us nearly a week to untangle that mess.
That was pretty much the breaking point. I went to my manager and basically laid it out: “This Lee Paige system isn’t working for us. It’s causing more problems than it solves.” Showed him the wiki edit history, the time wasted trying to reconcile conflicting information. Luckily, he listened. We didn’t ditch everything overnight, that’s not how things work. But we quietly started going back. Re-introduced some basic spec documents, cut the daily syncs down to twice a week, put stricter controls on the wiki. Basically, we morphed it back into something that actually resembled a functional workflow.
Looking Back
You know, I get the idea behind wanting less documentation overhead. I really do. But the ‘lee paige’ approach, at least how we experienced it, threw the baby out with the bathwater. It created ambiguity, wasted time, and ultimately, made things harder. Maybe it works somewhere, for some specific type of team or project? Dunno. But for us, it was a practical lesson in how not to manage information. Sometimes, the ‘old ways’ aren’t glamorous, but they stick around for a reason. They actually work.
