User stories for creating review templates

Planning the review template requirements

Before you create a review template, it is recommended that you meet with business owners and review participants to understand the requirements for a managed review. Business owners, content owners, and review participants have expertise and knowledge that help you to plan the specifics for a managed review that include:

• The number of stages and flow of the review.

• The requirements to review and approve content.

• The people who initiate and moderate reviews, and the people who review and approve content.

• The people in the review and approval process who:

  • Initiate and moderate reviews.

  • Review and approve content.

• Regulations a review must adhere to, such as storage and auditing requirements.

It is necessary to consider the requirements to plan and create review templates, which include:

• Providing a name and description.

  Names and descriptions help review initiators to choose the review template to use.

• Determining the number of review and approval stages in the review.

  For each stage, you can determine whether participants complete the stage serially or in parallel, and whether stages start immediately after another stage completes. For example, the review content requires an update before the next stage. After the comments have been incorporated and the content updated, reviewers in the next stage are only required to assure that their comments have been incorporated. The Solution Accelerator accommodates both workflows to allow review initiators to receive the comments or allow for straigh-through processing, typical for later stages.

  A review has at least one review stage or approval stage. You can add more stages, depending on the complexity of your review and approval workflow. Each stage has a set duration or time limit, but can be changed when circumstances of the review change.

  For each stage, it is necessary to specify how the stage executes. You can configure the stage to have participants review or approve the document in parallel or in a particular sequence. It is also necessary to determine how participants complete the stage. For example, you can permit participants to provide comments or approve the document, or both.

  When a review consists of more than one stage, you can specify whether the next stage starts immediately after another completes. Alternatively, you can require that review initiators manually start the next stage in the review.

• Determining the duration or schedule for a stage.

  For each stage, you can specify the duration in minutes, hours, or days. You can also specify whether to use business days or absolute days.

  As part of stage duration, you can configure a stage to run until all participants review or approve the content. Alternatively, the stage can be configured to continue and not expire until all required participants complete their tasks.

• Configuring whether reminders are sent to participants.

  Often, it is necessary for reviews to complete in a predetermined time frame. Time sensitive reviews often require that reminders are sent and tasks for incomplete reviews are reassigned. For example, if a review participant is not in the office, the review can be routed to the review participant’s supervisor or delegate.

• Configuring whether users review or approve content using Workspace or email.

• Determining whether participants see comments from other participants from different stages.

  When multiple review stages occur, you can permit comments to be visible to other reviewers in subsequent stages. Alternatively, you can configure the review so that comments from a stage are only visible to participants in current stage.

• Determining whether there are default participants or supporting requirement.

  Regulated review and approval workflows often have requirements that are complex. For example, in regulated environments, it is necessary to include default users and supporting documents. For example, a standard disclosure document can be attached for the review of documents containing sensitive intellectual property information.

• Adding auditing to the review.

  It is important for managed reviews to log actions that occur to build an audit trail. Audit trails record and monitor that review processes are compliant with established standard operating procedures. For example, you can build audit trails of when each stage starts and ends during a review. Then, you can use the audit trail to ensure that reviews complete in the time frame specified by your standard operating procedure.

Common questions to ask to clarify requirements

• What information is required to identify the review template and what format do you want the review templates displayed?

• Is there a naming convention used at your organization?

• How many review templates do you plan to have?

• Are reminders required?

• Are audit trails required for the reviews?

• Is it necessary for users to see comments made by participants in previous stages?

• Do stages require a manual intervention? For example, is it necessary for review initiators to revise a review stage?

• Are custom LiveCycle processes required to run before or after a stage?

• Are template authors required to configure reusable, optional processes as part of a review template?

• Is additional metadata required to improve searchability of review templates and the reviews?

• Is additional functionality presented to review participants, such as extra buttons to complete a review in Workspace?

• Are approval routing slips or review tracking sheets required?

Requirements addressed

• Provide a mechanism to define reusable, scalable review and approval processes.

• Provide a mechanism to define number of stages in a review.

• Provide flexibility to define review duration, such as reviews that are less than a day or reviews that do not expire (no deadline).

• Provide a mechanism to allow participants to review documents in parallel or in a particular order.

• Add supporting documents for each review.

• Specify review participants (reviewers, approvers, or moderators) for each stage.

• Send reminders for review and approval stages.

• The visibility of comments can be controlled for participants in subsequent stages.

• Stages can be started immediately after a stage completes (straight-through processing) or requires manual intervention.

• Add auditing to managed review and approvals.

• Provide a note when rejecting an approval.

• Automatic routing of review or approval task and scheduling of authorized reviewers.

• Permit prereview and postreview processes (sometimes called pre-processing and post-processing hooks) to execute before and after a stage.

Best practices, tips, and tricks

• Plan time to meet with your users to identify naming schemes and descriptions to use for review templates. Doing so helps business users to create review templates that are easy to find and use.

• Use a naming convention that is consistent and easy to use. For example, if you automate human resources (HR) and information technology (IT) review and approval workflows, prefix the review template names with HR and IT, respectively.

• Include internal URLs or information in the review template description to let users understand the review and approval process being managed. Alternatively, attach the information as supporting documents.

• Identify and set common information used to initiate reviews as defaults. Setting defaults help to make starting reviews easier. For example, you can add the entire legal department as default users for review and approval processes that require legal reviews.

• It is common to integrate processes to run before and after a review or approval stage completes, respectively called prereview and postreview processes. When you create processes in Workbench, plan, develop, and test the processes separately before you integrate them with your reviews.

  The following are example prereview processes (sometimes called pre-processing hooks) to consider integrating with a review:

  • Watermark the file with the version and stage number.

  • Indicate which pages are new by changing the header or footer of that page.

  • Bates number the pages for legal judicial review.

  • Save a copy of the file to a version repository.

  • Use optical character recognition on image files to allow reviewers to search the image.

  • Set up PDF settings to configure initial view for the review document.

  • Attach review instructions page as the first page in the review document.

  • Add RSS feeds to indicate that a review has started.

  The following are postreview (post-processing) processes to consider integrating with a review:

  • Remove any of the artifacts inserted above.

  • Save a copy of the file and its comments to a special repository.

  • Archive the comments separately from the file.

  • Add RSS feeds to indicate that a review has ended.

  • Provide an analysis, such as the time or number of comments, people who participated in the review, and create a report.

  • When content is approved, generate a final copy with a version number, archive it with other artifacts of a completed document.