Gary Eckstein is a Business Analyst based in Sydney, Australia. Gary can reduce your organization’s costs and improve quality by implementing and managing document review processes. Gary may be contacted at Gary Eckstein, +61 (0)4-1092-3445, gary@eckstein.id.au, http://eckstein.id.au

In large corporations the review of documentation comprises tens of thousands of labour-hours per year. In this article a best-practice approach to document review processes is offered; this document does not describe authoring documents but rather the document review process between a Customer and Supplier.

The Advantages of Review Process Best-Practice
There are numerous advantages to adhering to a best-practice document review process:

• Quality: The quality of documents is enhanced through clear guidelines and defined roles and responsibilities.
• Costs: For the Supplier, documentation costs will be reduced through reduced rework and less documented ambiguity.
• Ongoing relationships: As documentation is often one of the first times operational people from the Supplier and Customer engage, being professional from the start sets a positive ‘tone’ for ongoing business relationships.
• Customer care: The Supplier, through review process best-practice shows that they are serious about meeting the Customers’ needs. This results in enhanced Customer care for the Customer.

Context
Most major contracts between organizations involve some form of documentation creation and delivery (i.e. a contract deliverable). For example, suppose that an I.T. service provider has been awarded a multi-million dollar contract to provide networking services to a government department. The government department (the Customer) will typically specify during contract negotiation what documentation they expect to attain from the I.T. service provider (the Supplier).

The documentation required will usually include some form of operational documentation which describes how the contract deliverables will be provided to the Customer by the Supplier. The responsibility for authoring the documents will be with the Supplier and the Customer will be responsible for reviewing the documents.

It is assumed for this article that the documentation to be delivered by the Supplier to the Customer is of an operational nature i.e. how the contract is to be delivered from an operational perspective.

Key Supplier Considerations
The documentation requirements are usually legally binding upon the Supplier. This obviously means that great care needs to be taken to ensure that ambiguous detail is avoided and that only items in the contract are included in the subsequent documentation.  Often Suppliers and/or Customers will purposefully attempt to create ambiguity in the documentation in order to gain an advantage over the other party.

Creating documents is very costly and therefore the Supplier must attempt to manage the document process as effectively and efficiently as possible with both quality and costs being key considerations.

Key Customer Considerations
As with the Supplier, the Customer also needs to ensure that they understand exactly what is in the documentation and that it corresponds to what is in the agreed contract/s. Again, unclear detail must be avoided. The Customer must be able to clearly understand how the contract is going to be delivered per the text in the document/s and that the operational delivery will compliment and support the Customers business.

So, from the Suppliers perspective, what is best practice in a document review process?

The Document Review Process
The following Ten Step document review process works well.  Organizations should customize this process as they see fit:

1. Documentation Review Plan. This documented plan is created to define, document, agree and communicate the process; the scope, format, limitations, process, responsibilities, timings, people involved and so on should all be agreed before any document writing commences. Templates should also be created at this step and agreement with all stakeholders attained. Communicating the documentation plan is vital to the success of the documentation process.
2. The ‘first draft’ document is created and given to the Customer for review.
3. The first review by the Customer will typically involve a conceptual and high-level review i.e. is the concept of the document correct, the content relevant, the scope correct ...?
4. The feedback is considered and entered in the reviewed document by the Supplier. Any debated feedback is communicated and agreed with the Customer.
5. The second review by the Customer is a more detailed/low-level review by the Customer e.g. is the detail in fact correct, is the terminology correct etc. No high-level feedback or scope changes should be accepted from the Customer as this should have been given in the first Customer review.
6. The feedback is considered and entered in the reviewed document by the Supplier. Any debated feedback is communicated and agreed with the Customer.
7. The third review by the Customer: there should be very little feedback by the Customer as they have had two previous reviews to air their concerns.
8. The final feedback is incorporated by the Supplier.
9. Supplier Document Owner sign-off: the owner of the document must agree to, and sign-off on, the document.
10. The final step is the Customer sign-off.

Of course reviewing the process is necessary so that it may be improved for the next document review needed.

Process Management
It’s all good and well to have a clearly defined and successful process however there is a missing ingredient. Adherence to the process through management by a single process manager is vital. Because Customer and Supplier management is required, an experienced and disciplined approach to process management is needed.

As an example, if there isn’t good management, it is more than likely that review comments by the Customer will be returned to the Supplier in an unordered and haphazard way. It takes a good manager to ‘push-back’ on the Customer to insist that all review comments be returned to the Supplier in a single review document (even although the means of communicating feedback should be defined in the first step of the process).

Summary
Suppliers often produce inadequate documentation for Customers. This is usually as a result of the Supplier not being professional in their approach to documentation delivery. Following the ten step documentation review process is sure to greatly enhance the quality of documentation produced, will reduce costs and will give the perception of the Supplier being professional.