Document review approaches for a small team
December 19, 2019 6:35 AM Subscribe
I'm looking for a way to manage the review and approvals of Word documents among a small team. We have Google Drive (and Team Drive) and Slack, but I'm not sure of the best approach to use these tools (or something else). Any advice?
I manage a team of four (soon to be five) people. We frequently have to share Word documents for review and approval by the team. Usually the edit suggestions are light and don't require lots of back-and-forth. I want everyone to have a chance to review each document before it goes on to the next level of approvals (me). When there were only two people on the team (about a year ago) they just emailed the Word documents as attachments and responded with their suggestions and approvals, then forwarded them on to me. With an expanded team, though, this process is unwieldy and things back up and/or fall through the cracks easily.
I want an easy way for someone to share a document among the team, have everyone provide comments and suggestions, and hopefully a way to say "I approve" and have it all be transparent, at least to me and the person who posted the document originally. Ideally there would also be a way for me to see who had or had not approved a file so that I can better keep track of the process overall.
We have Google Drive (and Team/Shared Drive, whatever the difference is), and we are all pretty proficient in using it. Our organization also has Slack licenses for everyone, but my team has never really gotten on board with it, though I think we easily could if we can figure out a system for this review process. Would one of these be the best approach? If so, how would you suggest we set this up? We have access to other tools that we don't really use, either (e.g. Jira) so if there's something else you have used that might solve this problem let me know and I can see if we have it.
Thanks in advance for any advice!
I manage a team of four (soon to be five) people. We frequently have to share Word documents for review and approval by the team. Usually the edit suggestions are light and don't require lots of back-and-forth. I want everyone to have a chance to review each document before it goes on to the next level of approvals (me). When there were only two people on the team (about a year ago) they just emailed the Word documents as attachments and responded with their suggestions and approvals, then forwarded them on to me. With an expanded team, though, this process is unwieldy and things back up and/or fall through the cracks easily.
I want an easy way for someone to share a document among the team, have everyone provide comments and suggestions, and hopefully a way to say "I approve" and have it all be transparent, at least to me and the person who posted the document originally. Ideally there would also be a way for me to see who had or had not approved a file so that I can better keep track of the process overall.
We have Google Drive (and Team/Shared Drive, whatever the difference is), and we are all pretty proficient in using it. Our organization also has Slack licenses for everyone, but my team has never really gotten on board with it, though I think we easily could if we can figure out a system for this review process. Would one of these be the best approach? If so, how would you suggest we set this up? We have access to other tools that we don't really use, either (e.g. Jira) so if there's something else you have used that might solve this problem let me know and I can see if we have it.
Thanks in advance for any advice!
Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestion! Yes, we can use Google docs, but I would like some suggestions for just how to set this up, especially the approvals part. Does Google Docs/drive have a way to add a formal approval/review process that I can't seem to figure out?
posted by arco at 9:53 AM on December 19, 2019
posted by arco at 9:53 AM on December 19, 2019
I am part of a four person proofreading team for a film festival. We use Google Docs for this, and it’s pretty good. The editor will share a film blurb document with the first proofer on the list. That proofer will mark up the document and append their initials to the document name when they are done. The editor sees those initials in the file directory and then knows to share it with the next proofer and so on. After 2-3 rounds, the editor either accepts or rejects the changes. There are also ways to add comments in the margin of the document so there can be discussion.
posted by oxisos at 11:57 AM on December 19, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by oxisos at 11:57 AM on December 19, 2019 [1 favorite]
Do you have Microsoft Office 365 (or a different Office bundle)? That should come bundled with Sharepoint Online (at a minimum) which has ways to set approval workflows. It takes a little bit of work at the beginning to set up, but it should offer basic approval routing and verification.
If Sharepoint isn't an option, there are other bare bones document management systems at various price points.
posted by muddgirl at 1:15 PM on December 19, 2019
If Sharepoint isn't an option, there are other bare bones document management systems at various price points.
posted by muddgirl at 1:15 PM on December 19, 2019
Google sheet document as a tracker with a column for the file name and a column for each person on your team.
Author of a document adds it to the list, and as others read it/have notes/approve, they can change the color of the row’s cell in their own column to yellow/red/green/whatever statuses work for your department
When the team signs off (all squares are green) and passes the doc to you, you hide the row to keep everything tidy. (Or have a supervisor status column that the sheet can be filtered by, so if you need to return the doc for revisions, the status can go back to “active” without dealing with unnecessarily unhidden rows)
posted by itesser at 1:15 PM on December 19, 2019
Author of a document adds it to the list, and as others read it/have notes/approve, they can change the color of the row’s cell in their own column to yellow/red/green/whatever statuses work for your department
When the team signs off (all squares are green) and passes the doc to you, you hide the row to keep everything tidy. (Or have a supervisor status column that the sheet can be filtered by, so if you need to return the doc for revisions, the status can go back to “active” without dealing with unnecessarily unhidden rows)
posted by itesser at 1:15 PM on December 19, 2019
You could use Google Docs plus assignments for this. At the top of each Google Doc, you could add five comments, e.g., "Review: +person1@yourgdocsdomain.com" and check the box on each of these comments for "Assign to Person Name." That changes the comment bubble to an assignment bubble and sends out a notification about the document to each person's Gmail inbox. Also, if people are signed into Slack and have enabled the Google Drive integration, they will get a notification from the Google Drive app when you assign them something, e.g.,
This could also be tracked using Jira, by creating a story or task per person per item to be reviewed in your sprint or on your kanban board, depending on how this project on your specific Jira instance is set up. Then once someone completes their review of a given item, they could just resolve that specific Jira story or task. You could set this up so that your team members have a Team Member role and only get notifications when Jira stories are assigned to them or when stories they're assigned are updated, but you get a role like Manager on the project that sends you a notification for every update to the Jira story. That way you'll know when all reviews are complete for the document and it's your turn to take a final look. The downside of this is that you have to write a Jira story for every person who needs to review every document; it could get tedious if you're not already using Jira for other things.
One note on the language and procedures regarding this: I would only have each reviewer state that they have completed their review of the document, not that they approve it, unless they have finished reviewing it and had no changes whatsoever. Otherwise, if they added any questions or comments in comments or assignment bubbles or on a Jira story, or added any suggested edits to the document (a note on that in a sec), they should only state that their review is complete, since presumably the document wouldn't technically be "approved" until their suggested edits were approved.
Also, each person who makes updates to the document who is not in charge of the final approval should track their changes by making them in Suggesting mode and/or simply adding comment bubbles. Then you or someone else at your level would be the person in charge of accepting or rejecting all the changes everyone has made and ensuring that the changes made don't add errors to the document. Having everyone track their changes this way, in Suggesting mode, makes it really easy for each reviewer to see what someone else has updated, so you're not getting into one of those situations where the first reviewer puts a comma before "and" in a sentence, the second one takes it out, the third reviewer adds it back along with an accidental extra space, etc. Tracking changes in this way builds accountability and dialogue into the system (e.g., Person 1 could leave a comment on a paragraph: "+person2@yourgdocsdomain.com, can you double-check this figure for 2019?" and then Person 2 could check that and write back with the information they found, and make any change that is needed in Suggesting mode).
posted by limeonaire at 2:33 PM on December 19, 2019
@person1 commented onThen once each person has completed their review, they can add a note to their own assignment bubble and use the checkmark to resolve it. Once the other 4 assignment bubbles are resolved, you can take your pass through the document for final approval.
Google Doc Name Here
"Review: +person1@yourgdocsdomain.com"
This could also be tracked using Jira, by creating a story or task per person per item to be reviewed in your sprint or on your kanban board, depending on how this project on your specific Jira instance is set up. Then once someone completes their review of a given item, they could just resolve that specific Jira story or task. You could set this up so that your team members have a Team Member role and only get notifications when Jira stories are assigned to them or when stories they're assigned are updated, but you get a role like Manager on the project that sends you a notification for every update to the Jira story. That way you'll know when all reviews are complete for the document and it's your turn to take a final look. The downside of this is that you have to write a Jira story for every person who needs to review every document; it could get tedious if you're not already using Jira for other things.
One note on the language and procedures regarding this: I would only have each reviewer state that they have completed their review of the document, not that they approve it, unless they have finished reviewing it and had no changes whatsoever. Otherwise, if they added any questions or comments in comments or assignment bubbles or on a Jira story, or added any suggested edits to the document (a note on that in a sec), they should only state that their review is complete, since presumably the document wouldn't technically be "approved" until their suggested edits were approved.
Also, each person who makes updates to the document who is not in charge of the final approval should track their changes by making them in Suggesting mode and/or simply adding comment bubbles. Then you or someone else at your level would be the person in charge of accepting or rejecting all the changes everyone has made and ensuring that the changes made don't add errors to the document. Having everyone track their changes this way, in Suggesting mode, makes it really easy for each reviewer to see what someone else has updated, so you're not getting into one of those situations where the first reviewer puts a comma before "and" in a sentence, the second one takes it out, the third reviewer adds it back along with an accidental extra space, etc. Tracking changes in this way builds accountability and dialogue into the system (e.g., Person 1 could leave a comment on a paragraph: "+person2@yourgdocsdomain.com, can you double-check this figure for 2019?" and then Person 2 could check that and write back with the information they found, and make any change that is needed in Suggesting mode).
posted by limeonaire at 2:33 PM on December 19, 2019
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posted by brainmouse at 8:51 AM on December 19, 2019 [1 favorite]