A good rule of thumb is to treat everyone as busy individuals whose time is valuable, but another rule of thumb is to break this rule and be more of a jerk if an essential employee isn't giving you the information you need to do your job. Tailor your approach to the person, come prepared to meetings, batch your questions into related sets rather than bothering people every twenty minutes with individual questions, and thank everyone for their time. Your contribution to a project isn't immediately obvious, so try not to be put out if people aren't as forthcoming as you'd like. Technical writers
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