Reviewing Technical Documentation

by  David Odell  

Getting technical reviews done for technical documentation is becoming noticeably harder. During the last few years, being based at different companies and using different review methods, the phenomenon connected with the problem of getting technical reviews completed by SMEs remains the same.

Theoretically the easy way to get you documents out and reviewed is to distribute it to a pre-determined list, either hardcopy or electronic via email, and ask for comments back by a certain date. This way you are guaranteed to get nothing or almost nothing back, even if you have been chasing them up by email for a response. And if you do get responses they are either contradictory, full of questions or question marks (even more annoying), or they have been editing typos and not the technical stuff.

Another option is to call a meeting. Some people love meetings and will spend the whole day going from one to another because it gives them the air of self importance, and to others they will seem to be at the cutting edge of the company. You will probably find that the people who have not been giving you written feedback to your review requests are the first to respond to meeting invitations.

Not wishing to go into the psychological reasons why this happens, there is one thing you must bear in mind; just because you have a group of attentive project SMEs and leaders around a table do not automatically assume you are going to achieve anything.

SMEs rarely prepare for a review meeting, you are lucky if they even read any part of the document. They leave the reading until the meeting and then comment in real time. This limits their time spent reviewing the document is the length of the meeting itself, instead of the hours they would have spent reviewing the document properly. This approach leads to a poor review of the document for you.

If the SMEs do a read through the document before the meeting, it is still difficult to cover much more than the first 30 pages in an hour long meeting. So if you are dealing with long documents multiple meetings are required and the SMEs attendance will dwindle.

My conclusion of all this is to have a review meeting after a first technical review. Allow the SMEs to do a paper review and send you the comments, making them aware a meeting will be held within one week of you receiving the comments back. When you get the comments back compile them into page order and then redistribute this list with a meeting invitation.

And you have no fear that the reviews will get done as nobody wants to waste time going over a document page-by-page, which they all know they will have to do if no pre-meeting reviewing is carried out..

You can then hold the meeting with the knowledge that a lot of the points have already been resolved. Action points can be made against those that are outstanding. Everybody will know who you are and you will know what is really happening in the project.

Dave Odell - Freelance writer