Rip the pages out of the document
A brief consulting assignment in Norway some weeks ago focused on a traditionally very document-centric process. In the oil & gas industry it is known as transmittals.
In big projects where one company contracts with another (or many others) to build multi-million dollar facilities it is important that all requirements are collected, agreed upon and signed off. Documents are well suited for representing a snapshot of information at a particular point in time. What's in is in, what's out is out. But just because it is useful to deal with a document set at the time of sign-off, there is no reason for the entire process to become document driven. In my opinion, documents may not be the best way to generate the information and documents may not be the best way to use the information afterwards.
In fact, tying the process to the document format slows it down. It is difficult for several contributors to work with the same document, so sometimes documents are passed round sequentially or sections are farmed out for individual contributors to own - resulting in less transparency of what decisions others are making. Version control becomes a critical mechanism and extra resource is often called in to manage the versioning and distribution of documents. Documents are typically sent via email so it is up to every contributor to manage documents locally.
Simple collaborative tools could be deployed in this scenario to reduce risk and increase efficiency. A wiki would support compartmentalising everybody's contributions while maintaining transparency and allowing for shared editing. Real-time shared editing of documents could be used to put the document set together for verification and sign-off. Comments and annotations could be used to facilitate the dialogue between authors and reviewers. Tags on chapters and paragraphs would help with execution later when everything is delegated to project teams. The trick would be to represent the entire bundle of knowledge as a document set (including drawings etc) that can be signed off but to maintain structure and access optimised for collection, definition and execution.
The tools exist to rewire the process but a challenge remains. That of bandwidth: If you have contributors working in the desert or on an oil rig, it becomes difficult for them to work with information stored on a central server; tools that support offline working and synchronisation are needed.
Are you familiar with the work of Dot Net Solutions [1]? They have smart document handling software (Microsoft-based obviously). Check out the demo in this video [2] (they are first).
Disclaimer: I know Tim Scarfe ;-)
[1]: http://www.dotnetsolutions.ltd.uk/main/
[2]: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=201153
Posted by: Mark Wubben | 14 June 2006 at 19:56