Top 5 challenges you will face with document review

Back in October, we gave a workshop at the San Francisco STC chapter that addressed some of the benefits and challenges associated to collaborative review. Identifying the main problems in document review work is the main step to achieving an effective document revision process. While everyone’s experience is unique, we can clearly identify recurring problems in document revisions:

Version madness

The number of versions increases each time we exchange or modify the document. Due to the lack of document revision history, some readers end up working on the wrong version of the document.

Poor (no) process defined

Documents get sent for review without a clear process and guidelines for the reviewer. Ownership responsibilities lack or are not clear (writer, co-writer, reviewer, etc.). Furthermore, once we send the document out for review, there is no way of tracking the reviewers’ progress. Lack of a document management system usually causes confusion between collaborators and delays in work delivery.

Security

There are several security issues associated with document sharing – emails can be intercepted or hacked and your file sits on someone else computer, memory stick, or network. Did you ever wonder what happens to your business document once you sent it to 10 recipients? Do you know for sure that the document is stored in a safe place?

Lengthy review cycle

Sometimes (too often?) feedback on the document arrives at the last minute. It is often too late to make serious edits before the deadline or it is risky at best.

Conflicting feedback

Document review means dealing with conflicting feedback. This can be very time consuming and requires a lot of work and assiduity from the author to track down reviewers, sort things out, and reach a common agreement.

In summary, there are many challenges inherent to document review and collaboration, and little has been done so far to address those in a simple and effective way. Although there are a lot of complex online document management applications, most of them do not incorporate features for solving all the problems listed above.

You probably wonder how to review your documents in a safe, fast and effective manner. Agilewords is a document review tool that was built to solve all these issues and ensure you total document revision control.

I’d like you to share your own experience in document revisions and tell us what challenges you face in your daily job regarding document review and how you try to address those and we’ll try to show you how to improve your document review work.