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When I worked (all too briefly) for Nortel before their "troubles", I
was assigned to a switch that was a regularly purchased item for the
Department of Defense. Thus, we had both funding for maintenance and
upgrades and we had to have a record of the changes made that affected
that product.
We, too, had problems getting folks to respond in a timely fashion to
electronic versions, so we had to produce paper copies for
distribution to the SMEs. We also used a specific set of directions
for them regarding what we were looking for--mostly to verify
technical accuracy.
When the initial and individual review period was over, all the
involved SMEs met to go over the affected sections with the tech
writers assigned to those sections. This was scheduled well in advance
and was *not* optional. Of course, we also served refreshments--so it
was not so onorous for the SME types.
At the conclusion of that review meeting, everyone present signed off
on the doc with the agreed changes indicated...whereupon we
incorporated the changes and distributed the changed docs--this time
via .pdf files that were signed off again by the SMEs. These were the
documents that went into the software release (our docs were all .pdf
for that product).
However, any process you use for any sort of regulated environment or
one in which there are ISO aspirations must have a clear process that
can be easily audited. Since this also fixes blame, once the various
participants realize they cannot avoid it they will generally go
along. There is something about signing off on something you know
could bite you later that helps to focus the mind quite wonderfully!
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