How Do You Know When Good is Good Enough?

How do you know when good is good for any document you may produce?

I ask this question in every workshop I facilitate. Generally the response is a head nod followed by the comment "Yes, that is the question.....I wish I had the answer." There is the rub. We rarely sit back and consider the notion of what attributes we need in place to have a high quality communication product. 

Often we will work on a document until we run out of time (I am convinced the only marker used by the majority of people authoring documents in the pharmaceutical or medical device world is time.) We do this because we have not defined what document quality "is."

Defining document communication quality means developing expectations or standards of quality. Standards can be applied at the level of an individual, team, or an organization. Defined standards or definitions of quality are prerequisites for measuring quality. If standards don’t exist, they must be designed.

Standards are explicit statements of expected quality. They may apply to writing and reviewing practice as well as to the document product. In terms of writing, document standards communicate expectations for how a particular document will communicate to the user what is to be known or to be done. In essence the standards establish the parameters that ensure a document achieves the desired results.

Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog