Hi guys,
I'm trying to work out the best approach for managing reviews for controlled scientific documents that can have different review stages (up to 3 review stages), across different departments (or groups), for up to 12 reviewers in total. Within the organisation there are groups of users who may be required to review certain documents, but as the groups/reviewers can change depending on the type of document, my initial feeling is that it's a lot more manageable to process at a template level using individual names (e.g. a dropdown lookup against an AD list) instead of groups. Or is there a clever way of selecting and managing groups of reviewers?
Where I've gotten to so far is along the following lines based on a process I found in here for another project I was working on last year (sorry I can't remember whose idea it was to credit it to):
Set up two, multi-line fields in the template:
- Reviewers
- Awaiting Reviewers
The document author selects the first stage reviewers by populating the Reviewers field, saves and closes the template.
Workflow counts the reviewers, copies the reviewer names into both a token and the Awaiting Reviewers field, notifies the reviewers, and clears the Reviewers field:
As part of the BP Step instructions, the reviewers are instructed to add their name back into the (now empty) Reviewers field once they complete their review. This provides the added functionality of the template displaying to the author where the review process is at and who is being waited on:
Further to that, all reviewers have to be logged as acknowledging completion of their review, so being that I would need to re-use the Reviewer field for the next review stage, or if having to re-run the same review stage if different reviewers need to be included, I would probably add another step to write/append the reviewer name and date to a read-only field once they entered their name back into the Reviewers field on completing their review.
It works fine when there's just a handful of reviewers, but if they end up with a full complement of reviewers and multiple review stages, or a change to the document content that requires the addition of different reviewers and a repeat of one of the review stages, then things are going to get messy pretty fast.
Any ideas on how to best implement this?
Thanks!
Mike