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Sarah said she is having trouble with reviewers actually reviewing her
documents.
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You've already gotten some good advice on how to approach this, so I'm
not going to go into how to handle this particular incident, but how to
head it off in the future.
I work with buyers and other people in Merchandising at my company, who
have a great deal of responsibility for the success of our company. In
other words, they have more important things to do than review a
training or reference document. I understand this and try to make it
easy for them.
I tell them to make sure to pay attention to content, and not get bogged
down in grammar and punctuation (some of them will). If possible, I will
give them specific pieces to review, or review a chapter at a time.
Sometimes it's an e-mail with a couple of paragraphs to review. My most
successful reviews are when I've booked a room with a computer and
projector and held a meeting where I made changes to the docs as we were
reviewing them. That way, we left the meeting with the document final
and approved.
It's important to find a format that works for them. Someone mentioned
printing it as a booklet. With that much success, the final deliverable
should probably be in that format.
Consider asking if someone else in his area can review since he has
trouble with reviews. If he's not doing them anyway, he shouldn't have a
problem letting someone else do it.
Lastly, I can't overstate the importance of building relationships with
people. When you have people's respect and they know that you understand
the demands of their job, they become much easier to work with. Perhaps
this guy is beyond help. Then it becomes a problem your manager should
resolve.
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Laura Winkelspecht
Technical Writer
ShopKo
The views, opinions and judgments expressed in this message are solely
those of the author. The message contents have not been reviewed or
approved by the Company.
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