Document review: getting useful comments instead of six opinions

Document review is the step between a document being written and being used: somebody other than the author reads it, comments, and it is either changed or approved. It is where a great deal of time disappears in small organisations, usually because the request was please review, which invites everything and decides nothing.

The single most useful change is to say what you are asking for. Is this factually correct, is the approach right, is this ready to send, or do I need a legal opinion — four different questions, four different reviewers, four different amounts of time. Sent without that framing, a document collects wording preferences from people who were meant to check the numbers.

Ask for one of these, explicitly

• A factual check: are the figures, names, dates and claims correct? Fastest and most valuable, and the one people skip.
• A substantive review: is the argument sound, is anything important missing? Requires somebody who knows the subject and has time.
• An approval: is this authorised to go out? A decision, not a comment.
• A copy edit: grammar, consistency, formatting. Do this last and never simultaneously with the substantive review, or you will polish sentences that get deleted.
• A specialist review: legal, security, regulatory. Narrow, expensive, and worth requesting precisely.

Running the round

1. State the ask, the deadline, and what happens if somebody does not reply. Silence means approval is a legitimate rule if it is stated in advance.
2. Choose few reviewers. Two people who will read it beat six who will skim it, and six also guarantees contradictory comments somebody must reconcile.
3. Send a link rather than an attachment, so comments land in one place instead of five inboxes.
4. Set the sequence: substance first, then approval, then copy edit. Running them in parallel wastes the most expensive one.
5. Resolve comments visibly. Every comment gets accepted, rejected with a reason, or deferred — and the reviewer can see which. Silent rejection is what teaches people not to bother next time.
6. Decide who breaks ties. Contradictory feedback is normal and needs an owner, not another round.

The author decides, not the reviewers. A review gathers information; it does not create a committee. When every comment must be satisfied, documents converge on the least objectionable version, which is reliably the least useful one. Say plainly, at the start, that the author holds the pen and will explain what was not taken.

The deadline problem

Reviews stall for one of two reasons: nobody knows when it is due, or the reviewer is not sure what to do. Both are fixed at the point of sending. A specific date, a stated consequence for silence, and a one-line ask remove most of the chasing. The remaining case — a genuinely busy reviewer whose input you actually need — is a conversation rather than a reminder, and usually resolves faster than three follow-up messages.

Where it lives

Ettex Docs carries the comments against the document with a resolution state per comment, so the round is visible rather than scattered across replies; the versions that come out of it are covered in document version control, and formal sign-off in approval workflow.

What we do not do: no routing engine that sends a document to reviewers in sequence automatically, no deadline enforcement, no reminders. The rules above are conventions your team agrees, and honestly, at small scale conventions outperform workflow software — the constraint is attention, not routing.