The idealized model of document project management describes an iterative process of information planning, content specification, authorship, review, and publishing. Working to develop best-of-craft work practices aligned with this model can help organizations meet their goals efficiently and at lower costs.
Most organizations in the life sciences do not carefully consider their true costs to produce a document. When all the hidden costs associated with review are added in, the cost-per-page to produce a final version document becomes significant. If you add in opportunity costs for staff time dedicated to additional rounds of review (even if a document meets a specified deadline for the final version) then the cost-per-page skyrockets. Many organizations choose to ignore this point, which is why in my presentations on strategic review I have a slide with the Great Pyramids of Giza and the caption: “We can do anything we want as long as we have a 24/7 schedule and an expendable supply of labor.”
The goal for review is to improve document communication quality—not grammatical accuracy or data integrity, which is done via inspection. To be most effective and efficient, reviews need to be strategic and orchestrated. This means the primary focus of review by subject matter experts should be on the intended messages and arguments and testing the document to ensure it minimizes the prospects for a qualified reader to construct alternative meanings. Tasks not accomplished if you are editing a document for grammar and style.
Our systematic analysis of review practices at numerous companies strongly suggests that while significant time and energy is expended on document review, the collective effort is generally over-sized in relation to the improvements made in the communication quality of the documents. That is, there are more people and more rounds of review than should be needed to get to a final version document. Another way to look at it is that reviews do not really move the communication quality meter very far given how much time and resources are thrown at the task.
Our analysis suggests that review performance is hampered by poorly defined expectations for what the team wants to accomplish in a document, that reviewers do not apply systematic means of analysis to their review (meaning team reviews are largely ad-hoc feeding frenzies), and that reviewers stray from attending to the messages and arguments of a document, instead attending to matters truly related to publishing standards. In other words, reviewers stop being reviewers and become editors. Editing when you should be reviewing comes with serious costs.
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