One of the truisms we see in our McCulley/Cuppan consulting work is that rounds of document review tend to go until the point when the document must be sent somewhere. That's why we say that in the pharmaceutical industry, the opportunities for making changes to a document are virtually limitless. The problem driving this situation is most people involved with authoring and reviewing process do not have good markers to inform them of the overall communication quality of a document. So without good markers they are left to utilize really poor markers to help them measure document quality. Markers like: grammatical soundness; how many people have reviewed the document; how many rounds of review; and how many comments leveled on the text and data in the document. Unfortunately, these markers have little correlation in the case of grammatical soundness and, for the other three, no correlation whatsoever to the communication quality of a document.
To paraphrase Steve Jong in his paper (you can read it here) You Get What You Measure—So Measure Quality: "if you don't measure it, you'll never get it." This is so true with document communication quality. In order to measure communication quality you have to employ meaningful markers. We find our clients typically employ only two markers that are useful: accuracy and compliance. Unfortunately, neither of these do much to measure the quality of argument, soundness of logic, or overall usability of a document for the end-user. There are some useful markers to consider for measuring these document attributes. More on these markers in my next post.
Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog
