Re: most effective method for SME review?

[Keith Hood <bus -dot- write -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Most of the time, the only way I can get SMEs to review something at all is
to personally snag them in the hall and ask for the review face to face.
It's too easy for people who think they are already too busy to ignore any
form of electronic communication. Once they've talked about it with me they
take doing the review a little more personally, so that makes it more
likely they'll actually do it. It's harder to tell me to my face that they
will do it and then not, than it is to program Outlook to send everything
from me directly to the trash bin.

I have found a lot of people really like doing reviews by using the change
tracking feature in Word - once they know how to deal with it. Almost every
place I've ever worked, I find I'm the only person there who does, and I
have to circulate a paper on how to turn on and read tracked changes. That
sort of makes sense, because most other people use Word only at the most
superficial level. Once they know how to start and save a document, they
ignore most everything else. Again, a matter of being busy with other
concerns. And what the heck, being the only person in the office who
actually understands how to correctly format a document is how I get jobs.

"Munges"?

On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 7:12 PM, Tom Johnson <tomjohnson1492 -at- gmail -dot- com>
wrote:

> What has been your most effective method for reviewing docs with subject
> matter experts? I feel like I've tried everything and haven't really hit
> upon the best way of doing it.
>
> Some approaches I've tried:
>
> - comments forms on web pages
> - direct edits of source files on Github
> - in-person visits at my desk
> - email
> - JIRA tickets
> - Word docs
> - comments on PDFs
> - Google docs
> - Beegit
> - focused meetings
> - over-the-shoulder sessions
>
> My reviewers say they like to highlight passages and put their annotations
> the margins, similar to Google Docs. The only problem with that approach is
> that (1) Google Docs is prohibited at my work for enterprise content
> review, and (2) importing content into Google Docs munges the formatting
> (there's no bulk import/export).
>
> Nevertheless, Google Docs has been the best reviewing tool for my content
> (at least at a former company where we had Google Drive instead of MS
> Office). Beegit approximates Google Docs and allows you to use Markdown as
> the source, but there's no bulk import, so there's a lot of copying and
> pasting involved.
>
>
> Tom
>
> ---------------------
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