Structured Authroing: Enterprise Acceptance, Education, and PM?

After some unusual experiences with a recent structured FM project, I wanted to turn to a community of peers to learn if others have experienced similar situations and what advice you might offer, if you have. Here is the background of the situation:

I was hired by a high-tech company to update a techincal manual almost two years ago. The company had about 6 to 10 very long internal engineering and customer-facing documents, almost all of which had been managed with LaTex for years. In an attempt to improve their documentation process, their former graphic designer/technical writer had migrated the documentation for their flagship product to InDesign. That decision wasn't too practical, as it was a 200+ page hardware and software user guide for a telecom device, something not well suited for a layout program. After taking care of their short-term needs with updates in ID, I explained the benefits of structured authoring to the project supervisor and subsequently my contract was extended to migrate all of their documentation to structured FM. This process went extremely well, largely because I was given a great deal of autonomy due to my experience in such projects.I wrote a custom EDD and templates that could be applied to all documentation and successfully migrated their legacy documents.

After that phase of the project ended, though, I found it very hard to properly manage their documentation needs, largely because of their ignorance and unwillingness to understand some of the basic needs related to structured authoring. I had made a concerted effort to educate them about structured FM all throughtout the migration, but my overworked supervisor considered my detailed reports as "too much information." Somewhere along the way, I believe she came to think of structured FM as a magic bullet of some sort and my explanations became misinterpreted as some sort of waffling, incompetence, or an attempt to pad hours. Really what my requests consisted of were nothing more than a development cycle that preceeded editing, a period that would allow me to manage any EDD work. It should be noted that the document in question was updated in parallel with a software release schedule of approximately 6 months and the management of this document alone was a full-time job for my predecessor. I reduced this process to a cycle of approximately 2 to 4 months per year, largely through the benefits of structured authoring that I don't need to detail here. Problems really began occurring when sales people and management started requesting last-minute, wholesale changes to the documents only weeks before deadlines, changes which required significant changes to the EDD. In my last deadline I received 200 marked-up pages of graphic and content changes two weeks before deadline while I was finalizing release notes and last-minute work. To get these changes done, I ramrodded them through and destroyed the structure of the documents and then had to go back and fix them thereafter. More specifically, I requested two weeks to rewrite the EDD and reauthor the 200+ page document and was confronted with increduility that it could takes so long -- and it was demanded that I complete it in a matter of days. I was actually told to make the "structure" of the document simpler, because "it's just a simple XML file after all" This company obviously had larger problems with their production processes and I was given no authority to change them, but I still find it difficult to grasp what I came up against in terms of acceptance, education, and management realted to structured management project requirements, especially when I explained it in such clear terms.

Certainly I would like to hear from anyone who cares to comment on the details of my experience. But more universally, I wonder if such obstacles are commonplace in your experience -- this was the first time I have come up against them. Also, when it comes to project estimation related to writing EDDs and doing development work, could you share your methodologies for coming up with timelines?

Thanks in advance,

Douglas